


Snippets

by agentsofpuppies



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Domestic Avengers, F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, why does everyone use a million tags?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-04
Updated: 2016-08-17
Packaged: 2018-02-28 04:11:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 29
Words: 28,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2718320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agentsofpuppies/pseuds/agentsofpuppies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of short prompt fills from Tumblr and elsewhere. All Clint/Natasha.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prompt: Sick

**Author's Note:**

> In no particular order, not chronological in the least. All Clintasha, because of course.

"Can I help you?"

His light, teasing sarcasm drew her away from that hazy state between sleep and wakefulness. Clint stood with arms crossed, wearing full tac gear with his bow case at his feet.

"You're back." She sighed contentedly and let her eyes close again, convinced it was finally the real Clint stood before her. He'd come home three times already, twice in dreams and once as an hallucination, brought on either by the fever or wishful thinking.

"You're in my bed."

He sat beside her and pulled the hood of her sweatshirt back, brushed his fingers across her forehead. Her skin prickled uncomfortably at the coolness of his touch and she flinched away.

"You okay, kiddo?"

_Don't call me that, Barton._

The appropriate response rested on the tip of her tongue, but she couldn't find the energy to rise to his baiting. He liked to throw around the old nickname - a relic from their first few weeks as partners - when he needed reassurance she was conscious, usually in the field.

"Natasha."

He began to peel away her cocoon of blankets, layer by layer. When he got down to the big sherpa throw she rallied enough to push his hand away and flip her hood back up.

"Stop, Clint. It's cold."

Why did she want him home, again?

"It's not cold. You've got my thermostat stuck on 80."

But he tucked the pile of blankets back around her. His hand rubbed absently across her shoulders.

"You're really sick this time, Tash. Why didn't you go to Medical?"

"You weren't here."

It was stupid and childish, she realized that, but she'd never been able to make herself trust the S.H.I.E.L.D. medics.

"Hill would've gone with you."

"Couldn't find her."

"Didn't see her in the two hallways between your room and mine, you mean." 

She hummed a noncommittal sound, but didn't think his very accurate assessment needed to be dignified with a response. Clint sighed and rubbed the heels of his hands into his eyes.

"Your choice: me or Medical?"

"I'm not going to Medical."

Her declaration was undermined by a coughing fit, a harsh barking sound that made her chest ache.

"Stubborn," Clint accused, "but I slept on the Quinjet last night and don't have the energy to fight you." He disappeared into the bathroom.

When he returned he forced a thermometer on her ("102 and-a-half, God Nat, how are you still alive?"), made her swallow three pills and a plastic measuring cup full of sticky sweet syrup, swapped the pullover for one of his old t-shirts, and confiscated half her blankets.

"You're doing the opposite of making me feel better," she informed him, shivering under the paltry three layers of covers he'd left her with.

"You don't need six blankets and a pullover," he said, stripping out of his tac suit. "You _do_ need to stop talking before you lose your voice completely." 

He sat beside her again, this time in his boxers and mismatched socks, and resumed rubbing her back.

"Want anything before I shower?"

"My blankets back?" she appealed, and he rolled his eyes.

"Now you're just being a pain in the ass." He mussed her hair and tucked one of the blankets tight over her shoulders. "I'll leave the door open if you need me."

He passed out of her line of sight and her eyes fell on the pile of leather and Kevlar across the room instead. His quiver sat overturned by the door, arrows spilling out onto the carpet, and his bow case leaned against the nightstand with one clasp open.

She couldn't recall ever seeing his equipment abandoned on the floor. It gave her an anxious little flutter in her chest that wasn't entirely unpleasant, and which she didn't care to examine at the moment.

The steam from the shower warmed the room, making the air humid and thick, and finally, _finally_ , she felt tired muscles relax as the shivering subsided. Then Clint was sliding in behind her, leaning up on one elbow, heat still radiating from his skin after the shower. She pushed back against him and he tangled their legs, draped his arm across her chest, tucked her head into his shoulder. She clung to his forearm and twisted their fingers together.

"I'm sorry I wasn't here sooner," he mumbled into her hair, but she shook her head slightly, absolving him. She'd waited longer than two days before, and would again. His lips brushed soft and warm against her temple.

"You're better than Medical," she told him in a hoarse whisper.

"You're a cheeseball, Romanoff."

She felt the cherry-flavored syrup dragging her under, toward real sleep, not the fitful when's-Clint-coming-back half-rest she'd been battling. His voice washed over her, comforting in the same way his fingers combing through her hair was comforting, slow and gentle and steady.


	2. Prompt: Ugly Sweater/Mistletoe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint and Natasha attend the annual Ugly Sweater party.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll apologize in advance.

The soft chirping of the keypad in the hallway announced Clint's arrival. Her first instinct was to bound into the living room and find out what the big deal was about his ugly Christmas sweater. He'd been annoyingly secretive about his outfit for the party, putting her off with ' _You'll see_ ' and ' _Don't want to ruin the surprise_ ' and ' _You need to do your own thing this year, there's no way we can match_.' She wouldn't admit it, but she quite liked attending the S.H.I.E.L.D. Annual Ugly Christmas Sweater Party with Clint in matching hideous sweaters. It was _their thing_.

_Barton and Romanoff? They never have an extraction plan._

_Barton and Romanoff? Of course they're going to win the Ugly Sweater Trophy again this year._

She wouldn't admit it, but maybe she wasn't quite dressed yet because she'd been sulking in her underwear for the past half-hour. She didn't want Clint to know that, so while he banged around in her kitchen she pulled her sweater on. The sweater was custom made, fitted to hug her curves in all the right places, and was more dress than sweater, as it came to mid-thigh. A bright Christmas blue, with the silhouette of one reindeer humping another crocheted in white. Thank you, Etsy.

She tugged on black leggings and a pair of heels as Clint came to lean against the doorjamb, sucking a candy cane he'd presumably stolen off her tree.

"Aren't you ready yet? We're gonna be late."

She eagerly flicked her eyes away from the strap of her Louboutins and looked him up and down. At first, she didn't get it. Disappointment swelled in her chest; she'd been expecting something really spectacular. His red wool sweater was reasonably benign, if a little oversized, but then...

" _Ohmygod_ , Clint! I am _not_ going with you like that."

"Yours is just as bad!" he counter indignantly.

"This is an _Ugly Sweater_ party, not a _Get Written Up For Sexual Harassment_ party. You can walk in by yourself."

God, he'd blown their winning streak for _that_? The knife hidden in the top drawer of her nightstand seemed like an appropriate response.

"You're not even wearing pants!" he scoffed. "You don't have any room to talk about harassment."

"Leggings _are_ pants, genius."

She brushed past him to gain the living room, reminding herself that it was Christmas and she should be kind and forgiving and not stab her partner. He smacked her ass.

"Write me up?" he suggested, and waggled his eyebrows. "We could skip the stupid party."

Was that his game? Pick an outfit guaranteed to embarrass her, give her an out, and spend the rest of the night naked in bed?

He absolutely did not deserve hot sweaty sex, especially since he'd cost her the trophy. He wasn't getting out of this one unscathed.

"But you put so much effort into your costume," she deadpanned, and followed it up with an eye roll. "I've already told Hill and Carter we're coming."

If he was disappointed, he didn't let on.

"Wish Cap was making an appearance." Clint sighed wistfully and pulled a dreamy expression. "The night might actually get interesting."

"Hill and Carter aren't going to catfight over Steve. Find another source of entertainment."

He followed her to the door, apparently intent on badgering a little hint of office gossip out of her.

" _Please_ , I saw Maria checking out his ass in the conference room last week."

"Everyone checks out Steve's ass. _I_ check out Steve's ass."

Clint paused in the doorway, causing the automatic sensor to bleep angrily.

"You check out Spangles?"

Natasha shrugged and continued down the hallway. She could imagine his crestfallen expression, the sad puppy eyes.

"I check out your ass, too."

What the hell, it was Christmas.

"Yeah?" Clint called after her, audibly brightening. He jogged to catch up. "Whose is the best?"

"Mine," she answered decisively. He considered for a moment.

"Eh, fair enough."

They were fashionably late, but Natasha didn't much care. The first hour was always awkward groups of rookies hovering around the karaoke stage and wondering how much alcohol was appropriate for an office party. Hour two was usually when things picked up.

She came up short at the door, waved Clint through, and gave him thirty seconds lead time so she wouldn't be associated with... _that_. Almost immediately she heard ' _Bro!_ ' and ' _Nice one, Barton!_ ' and ' _That's my vote!_ '.

She took another thirty seconds to master the stab-my-partner impulse.

When she entered, she spotted Clint by the bar, fighting his way through what appeared to be the entire R&D department to place a drink order. Hill and Carter were stationed at one of the tall cocktail tables scattered around the perimeter of the room. Natasha detoured, leaving Clint to his fate.

"You and Barton fighting?" Hill asked in greeting. "You don't match."

"He wanted to do his own thing this year."

Carter stood on tiptoe and craned her neck to get a better look at the bar.

"His sweater doesn't look that special," she assessed. "I think he blew it."

"Oh, he definitely blew it. It's not the sweater. It's...just wait. He'll bring drinks in a minute."

They had a round of ' _Nice sweater_!' and ' _Love the shoes_!'. Carter had a big Rudolph head splashed across the front of her sweater, complete with a blinking red LED nose. Hill's sweater was more understated but classic, Merry Christmas Ya Filthy Animal picked out in red thread on green wool, but she'd found a pair of Manolo Blahnik glitter pumps that brought her game up a level. Natasha eyed them enviously.

They were making bets on which of the rookies would need carrying off the karaoke stage by the end of the night when Clint appeared. He shoved in between Hill and Natasha and plunked four beers down on the table

"Well?" he asked, taking a step back and spreading his arms wide, inviting opinions.

Carter's eyes lit up as if Christmas had come early. Hill choked on her martini.

" _Ohmygod!_ " Carter assessed gleefully.

"That's what I said," Natasha agreed, "but not with that tone."

She popped the cap of her beer against the edge of the table and downed half the bottle in one long draw.

" _Why_?" Hill wanted to know, shaking her head faintly as disgust curled her features.

"Are you going to karaoke, too?" Carter suggested.

"Hey! Not bad, Carter!" Clint bumped shoulders with her; she shot him an annoyed glance as beer sloshed out over her fingers. "See? She gets it! How many people here have a song-and-dance number to go with their outfit? I'll totally win."

"I'm not drunk enough for this," Hill groaned, and disappeared in the direction of the bar. Natasha privately agreed.

She finished her beers and waited impatiently for Clint to finish the last two, so she could send him back for more. They spent the next hour wandering around the room together. The girls from payroll giggled stupidly at Clint and flirted their eyes, Coulson stopped dead ten feet away and called ' _I am not dealing with that_ ' before vanishing seamlessly back into the crowd, and Natasha kept scanning the perimeter of the room.

And then she saw him, Father Christmas himself, minus the beard and plus an eye patch. Fury was chatting with the head of the IT department, decked out in a red velvet Santa coat with white fur trim and a matching hat.

"Hey, look!" she said brightly, and grabbed Clint's wrist in a death grip. "Saint Nick!"

Clint dug in his heels and tried to pull away.

"Nat, no!" he hissed urgently. "Don't be an asshole!"

"Director Fury!" she called. She raised the hand that held her fourth (Fifth? She couldn't keep up.) beer and waggled her fingers.

Fury broke away from his conversation and made his way over. Clint stopped struggling, and she whispered _'You're not taking my trophy_ ' sweetly in his ear.

Oh, she would have let it go if he'd chosen a run-of-the-mill hideous sweater and taken a stab at the trophy that way. She liked a little healthy competition. But she absolutely was not going to be associated with her partner having his junk gift wrapped.

Her eyes flicked down to Clint's crotch, where a brightly wrapped present was suspended from his belt, complete with a glittery mesh bow on top and a giant sprig of mistletoe.

Fury greeted them with smiles at first, and Natasha wished him Merry Christmas and waited for the shit to hit the fan. Fury's expression visibly hardened as he took in their ensembles.

"Agent Barton," he began, his tone dangerously soft and composed, "are you implying there's a dick in that box? And are we invited to provide you with sexual favors? Is that why you've incorporated mistletoe into the gift wrap?"

"I think that's the idea," Natasha interjected helpfully. Clint cut his eyes sharply in her direction. She pressed the beer bottle to her lips to hide her smirk.

"Son, you better rethink your fashion choices. I'll take a lap of the room, mingle, and when I come back I _do not_ want to see that box."

"Aww, Fury! I was gonna win!"

Fury pinned him with a glare that made even Natasha retreat a step, before turning his back and walking purposefully toward a group from accounting.

"You were going to get suspended," she shrugged, unrepentant. She drained the rest of her beer and helped herself to Clint's. "Then I'd be out a partner for Sao Paulo next week."

"Fury can kiss my ass," Clint muttered, not paying her any attention as he grudgingly removed his belt and the box with it. "I didn't even get to do the song."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're lost, look up the SNL skit "Dick in a box". c:


	3. Lola

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint and Natasha and the crew from the Bus. Because reasons.

"Greenscreen," Hunter proclaimed in an obnoxious sing-song voice.

"No way," Trip shot back. "That's raw footage from a camera on Third. Tell him, Skye."

"We're not even supposed to be _looking_ at this. I'm not tearing the file apart to see if it's been edited."

"I've got clearance. Hack away, I'll take the heat if we get caught."

"I like you, Barton."

"That asshole needs to be proved wrong." Natasha glanced over her shoulder to find Clint jabbing his finger at Hunter across the table. "Greenscreen my ass. That's Captain America and Black Widow."

"That's an impossible jump!"

" _I was there_. It happened. Fuck's sake."

"Really? Because according to the files, you were busy trying to drop Fury's Helicarrier in the middle of the Atlantic."

Natasha reflexively tightened her fingers around the gun in her hand a half-second before the group behind her exploded. Three chairs scraped back, two falling with a bang to the floor. Trip's admonishment of ' _Easy, guys!_ ' was lost under a squeal from Jemma and swearing from Skye as she clutched her laptop protectively against her chest.

" _Hey!_ " May shouted, forceful and authoritative. "Don't make me come back there."

Clint and Trip lifted themselves off the table and Hunter pushed off from the wall where he'd hastily retreated, picking up his chair. Skye returned her laptop to the table with a scowl.

Natasha caught Clint's attention and lifted an eyebrow.

_Was that necessary, Barton?_

He shrugged in response and slammed his chair back on four legs.

_Hunter started it._

"I am so tired of their pissing contest," May mumbled, and shoved the clip back into her gun with a little more force than necessary. "Did either of you do anything?"

"I divorced them both," Bobbi offered. "But you'd think that would count as common ground."

"I think it's principle. They feel like they should be enemies, so they are."

It was strange, because Hunter struck her as exactly the type of guy who should be Clint's new best-friend-slash-drinking-buddy. So far, all they'd accomplished was a series of progressively more ridiculous arguments. They'd done the classic football vs. soccer debate, they'd destroyed the firing range with the guns vs. arrows argument, and Clint topped it off by accusing Hunter of having a 'stupid pansy accent'. Which had hurt Jemma's feelings, and Natasha had to drag him to the lab to apologize, and this was exactly why Strike Team Delta worked alone.

She finished cleaning and reassembling her guns, trying to ignore the uncomfortable prickling sensation along the back of her neck. They were still stuck on the footage of her and Steve, talking about her, shooting little glances across the room to the gun-cleaning party.

She longed to ask May to go break it up, but Morse was sat beside her cleaning her own guns, and it seemed like a weakness to let on how twitchy the attention made her feel. Coulson was somewhere on base; maybe he'd wander into the common area and save her.

"The mental calculations," Jemma was saying, awe behind her tone. "The physics involved. It _is_ a rather impressive jump."

"It's staged," Hunter insisted. Clint growled. "Make your girlfriend prove it, then."

She bristled at that. May's eyebrows shot up across from her.

"Enough of this shit," Clint declared. She heard his chair scrape back. "Meet us on the Bus."

She turned her head just enough to get the group in her peripheral vision. They were all rising from the table, Clint stalking away in the lead.

"Natasha," he barked on his way out. She gathered her guns and spare clips and followed him.

She wouldn't ordinarily jump just because Clint demanded it, but Hunter had begun to grate on her nerves a little, too. Nobody had ever suggested the Black Widow should prove her skills before.

They reconvened in the cargo hold of the Bus a half-hour later, Natasha in her catsuit and Clint in his tac gear.

"This is a terrible idea," Fitz called, voice muffled by the reinforced glass of the lab doors. "I'm not involved in this, for the record. I'm doing science."

Jemma sighed fondly and shook her head before turning to Natasha.

"If you gave me the afternoon, I could calculate the approximate speed and velocity of the alien vehicle. We could rig a zip line for you to grab after Agent Barton throws you, so it would be authentic."

"Let's not," she replied. She was doubtful that Clint could get her very far off the ground. "I don't think this is going to turn out anything like the New York footage."

Clint seized her wrist and dragged her to the middle of the hold, then turned to address their assembled teammates.

"Okay, I'll be Cap. This is my shield." He held up a rectangular lid from one of the smaller shipping containers. "There's your burned-out husk of a car."

He gestured to the shiny red convertible a few feet away. Her stomach clenched uncomfortably.

"Trip's going to throw his football from the top of the stairs, and she's going to catch it. That's the closest we could get to an alien motorcycle on short notice." He turned to Natasha. "Show me where to stand, then jump."

"This is a really shitty idea, Barton," she whispered as she positioned him in relation to the car. Doing pretend science with Fitz definitely sounded like the better option. Less likely to get disemboweled that way.

"Just do it. I'm trying to protect your honor."

She snorted with derision.

"You know what Coulson's going to do if he sees this? He'll deport me, straight back to Russia. I'm sure the KGB will be _delighted_ to see me again."

"You're being dramatic."

"It's not going to be your boot print on Lola's hood."

"Trip can buff it out. _Go_."

He gave her a shove toward the car. She _was_ tired of Hunter running his mouth, even if most of it was provoked by her partner, and Coulson had been tied up in his office all morning. It was unlikely he'd show up in the ten seconds it'd take for her to reenact the shield jump.

She bounced on her toes a few times. Clint took up a defensive stance and braced the plastic lid against his arm.

She ran three long strides and vaulted off the hood of Coulson's Corvette.

" _ROMANOFF!_ "

The strangled, slightly hysterical shout startled her. She had a quick glimpse of Coulson striding into the hold before Clint thrust the shipping container lid up to meet her. The toe of her boot slipped on the plastic and he cracked her in the knee instead; she fell against the makeshift shield and threw Clint off balance. Her momentum paired with his threw her into an ungraceful flip, and while Clint fell hard on his side she rolled and slammed into the wall of the cargo hold. Trip's football made a sad, hollow echo as it bounced down the cargo ramp and into the hangar.

She heard a faint ' _Oh, shit..._ ' from Hunter, a cough that may have been a laugh from Trip, and an exasperated groaning noise from May. Then...

" _IT IS NEVER OKAY TO STAND ON LOLA_!"

Natasha winced and played dead. Maybe Coulson would buy it.

"Disciplinary write-ups! All of you! _Even you, May_!"

"I was doing science!" Fitz protested.

"Get up," Coulson snarled, and Natasha opened her eyes. He reached down and hauled her up by the back of her catsuit. She limped along beside him, pain lancing through her knee, as he collected Clint as well and marched them down the cargo ramp.

"You know," Skye began pensively from somewhere behind them, "The Cavalry lived up to the hype, but Strike Team Delta leaves something to be desired."


	4. Prompt: Post-CATWS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: sweet clintasha car moment after CATWS battle

"So looks like I missed the memo on the friendship necklaces." Natasha smiled a little and glanced at Clint. Hawkeye, of course he’d noticed. He was smirking to himself, eyes set firmly on the long stretch of interstate. "I want one."

"You want an arrow, too?" she asked, playing dumb because she wanted to hear him say it.

” _Please_ , I’m not Tony. Bet he’d get a replica of the Arc Reactor.”

"Bet it’d light up," she added.

"Text him," Clint suggested, and bit off half his candy bar. She did.

_You’re buying a friendship necklace to symbolize you bff. What do you get?_

"I need your Black Widow symbol. Or we could forget the jewelry and get tattoos. I’m thinkin’ big spider, right across one ass cheek. You can have an arrow heart with my name in it."

"Does it have to be on my ass, too?"

"Nah. Tramp stamp."

"Classy, Barton," she said with an eye roll.

She passed him the 72oz Slurpee cup and tore open a bag of gummy worms from the last gas station haul.

She hadn’t asked where they were going. Clint had showed up two days ago, pressed a Starbucks into her hand, badgered her into taking half a Vicodin for her shoulder, and packed a bag for her. Turned out the senators on Capitol Hill wouldn’t know where to find her, after all.

They were going South, and that was enough. The day was warm enough to shed their jackets and ride with the windows down, and Natasha felt herself truly relaxing for the first time in weeks. She reclined the seat and kicked her feet up on the dash.

"Tash, come on!" Clint reached over and swatted her leg. "I just had her detailed. It’s okay baby, I won’t let her do it again," he added in a soft tone, patting the steering wheel with one hand.

"Maybe you should get this car tattooed across your ass," she suggested, but obligingly kicked her shoes off before returning her feet to the dash.

"How do you know I haven’t?" he retorted.

The traffic slowed by degrees until they were at a standstill, boxed in by SUVs and eighteen-wheelers. Natasha sat up and leaned out the window, nervous energy thrumming taut in her chest. Nothing but gridlock for at least a mile, but no emergency lights visible up ahead.

"Easy," Clint muttered. She realized her hand was on the latch of the glove box, where she’d stashed her Glock that morning. "We’re okay. I’ll go check it out."

He left the engine running and walked a few car lengths up the highway. She watched him wave to one of the truck drivers, marveling at his ability to turn on the Midwestern charm and make friends.

"Chickens," he told her as he slid back into the driver side. It was such an odd thing to say, she forgot to be nervous as she arched an eyebrow. Probably why he’d chosen that as his opening statement.

"One of those guys flipped his trailer full of chickens," Clint explained. "They’re trying to catch them all. We’re backed up for three miles."

He shut the car off and fiddled with his phone until he pulled up a live feed from a news helicopter. Natasha reluctantly sank back into her seat and propped her feet up again.

They finished the snacks and flipped through the radio stations, watching the cars stack up behind them. Clint began to fidget, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

"You don’t have to get a matching one," he said suddenly, and removed the leather cuff from his wrist. Up until now she had thought it was just a bizarre fashion statement, but she saw that underneath, on the underside of his wrist, was a tiny black hourglass symbol.

"That better be Sharpie," she warned, anxiety twisting in her gut. Identifying marks were dangerous, moreso now, with Hydra openly gunning for them.

"You don’t like it?" he asked, feigning hurt feelings. "After all the pain I endured? You’re killin’ me, Tash."

"Clint-"

"Relax," he chided. "The bracer covers it when I’m shooting. You can’t see it on missions. Besides, our entire history’s out there. Pretty sure Hydra knows we’re… _whatever_ , by now.”

"That’s what we’re calling it? Whatever?"

"Didn’t think you liked labels,"he challenged, a sly little grin pulling his lips up at one corner.

Maybe it was time to give them a label. _Whatever_ stung more than it should have, especially after months apart and finally giving in and buying the stupid necklace for comfort.

"We can be…."

She cast her mind around for an appropriate term. ‘Friends with benefits’ cheapened what was between them, and ‘soul mates’ was too cheesy. ‘Boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend’ too juvenile.

"Together," she said at last.

"We’re always together," Clint pointed out. "Even when we’re not, apparently. We’ve got this weird ESP thing."

He gave her necklace a tug and she caught his hand, tracing her finger over the familiar shape etched into his skin.

"Guess it fits," he said, and leaned across the center console. "I can live with together."

She should tell him that together was months - years - overdue. She should tell him that together would have made the pasts few weeks more painful but also somehow easier. She should explain the necklace beyond ‘It reminded me of you.’

” _Just_ together,” she stressed instead, because she’d never been good at relationships. “If any of the guys ask.”

He tangled his fingers in her hair and pulled her forward into a kiss, hard and deep, their first since his return. She could feel him smiling.

"Finally gotcha, Red," he said softly as he pulled away, resting his forehead against hers. "Only took me eight years."

She bit her lip, but couldn’t stop the stupid sappy grin at Clint’s declaration. Together wasn’t so bad.

Her phone bleeped a text.

_Arc reactor. LEDs behind the diamonds. I’m the best person I know._

In true Tony fashion, he’d killed their moment.

"You know he isn’t serious," she said, and passed Clint her phone. It was the expected Stark answer, meant to deflect any real discussion about feelings.

"Its Tony, he’ll never admit he likes us that much. We’ll get him a charm bracelet with everyone’s thing on it for Christmas."

Apparently _together_ meant joint Christmas gifts.


	5. Prompt: Opera

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Clint and Natasha being forced to attend the opera as part of a mission

"This isn't even a real mission," Clint grumbled, and dropped heavily into his seat. "Since when are we freelance?"

"Since we owe Coulson about ten million favors. Can't blame him for calling one in."

"Fury made me take _vacation_ time. I was saving it."

"You have four-and-a-half months of vacation. When are you ever going to need that much downtime?"

"Maybe I want a four month long honeymoon."

" _We're not married_."

"That's not what Elvis said last week."

"Vegas weddings don't count. He wasn't even a real priest."

"It counted," Clint assured her. "The guy was ordained. Anybody can marry people, even Elvis. Hell, I bet I could get ordained before this stupid show's over."

"Okay," Natasha agreed. "If you can do it by intermission, I won't put our marriage license through the shredder."

"Challenge accepted," Clint smirked, and pulled his phone from his tuxedo jacket. "One more for the collection."

Natasha watched the orchestra file across the stage and settle in the pit. Their surveillance target was easy to spot despite being dressed almost identically to the other orchestra members: her instrument dwarfed the others in the string section.

"She's gonna recognize us," Clint muttered, studiously jabbing his fingers against his phone's screen.

"She won't," Natasha replied dismissively, more confidently than she felt. Coulson had introduced them only two months ago, but she had been blonde then and Clint had two week's worth of beard. Civillians weren't usually perceptive enough to make those types of connections. This particular civilian was dating Phil Coulson, however, so anything was possible.

"What is this, anyway? Carmen? Tosca? Shrek The Musical?"

Natasha looked blankly down at her lap, realizing with a start that she'd neglected to pick up a playbill.

"It's a surprise," she replied. Clint snorted.

"Jet lag doesn't look good on you, Romanoff."

"Rushman."

"Whatever. This is a milk run. Hope we've got a swanky hotel to match the car Coulson sent."

She hummed her agreement and scanned the crowd, although her thoughts were fixed more firmly on a plush mattress and room service than potential threats. Stepping off an international flight and into a limousine was overkill, even for her. Clint had done her hair with a curling iron plugged into the limo's cigarette lighter, for God's sake. She was pretty sure he was still bleeding somewhere under the tuxedo.

The lights went down, earning an immediate hush from the crowd.

"Done!" Clint hissed triumphantly beside her. He thrust his phone under her nose, proudly displaying a digital certificate declaring him a minister. The balding man next to them cleared his throat disdainfully. "We're still married."

"Thought it'd be more complicated than that," she mused.

The actors stepped onto the stage and began the show. The songs were all in French, and she stopped paying attention in favor of studying the audience and ushers for potential threats. It was nearing intermission when she felt Clint go stiff beside her, sitting erect with his eyes fixed on a point above the stage.

"Aww, sniper, no," he groaned softly.

She followed his gaze and caught a glint of metal from the catwalk over the set.

One of the actors went down, a red stain blossoming across the front of his costume.

"Milk run," Natasha repeated with an eye roll. She pulled the Glock from her Swarovski crystal clutch. "I'll handle Audrey."

"Got your back," Clint assured her, already stripped out of the restricting tuxedo jacket, a gun in each hand.


	6. Prompt: Jealous

Clint dropped heavily into the chair across from her, a slow, lazy grin stretching his lips.  
  
“Morning.”  
  
Natasha flicked her eyes up and studied his tousled hair disdainfully.  
  
“You missed our meeting with Fury,” she replied, and made a savage jab with her fork as he reached for a piece of her bacon. Clint’s reflexes were too good, and the fork only left a series of shallow impressions on the table.  
  
“That was last night?” Clint asked absently. He was still eyeing her plate, but she diverted his attention by pointedly laying her Glock alongside it. “Jesus, fine. I’ll get my own bacon.”  
  
“You skipped our run this morning, too,” she accused.  
  
“Give him a break, Romanoff.” Rumlow pulled out the chair beside Clint and sat. He slid his tray in Clint’s direction. “All yours, if you give me the details. How was she?”  
  
“Like a dream, man,” Clint replied, and chuckled a little. That stupid dazed expression was back. Natasha rolled her eyes and groaned in disgust.  
  
She glanced around the cafeteria, but it was 0800 and all the other tables were occupied. She considered abandoning her breakfast, but too hungry for that after her morning workout, decided to just bolt her food down and escape ASAP.  
  
“She’s a lady,” Clint began, having accepted his bribe. “You just need a really light touch to make her purr. Doesn’t take much to get her going, and when you do it’s fast and hard.”  
  
A junior agent, one Clint had been training in combat maneuvers, hesitantly took the seat on his other side, rapt with attention.

“Perfect shape, curves in all the right places. Not as heavy as she looked at first.”  
  
A couple agents at the table behind Clint turned in their seats to eavesdrop. Clint gave a smug little smirk, clearly enjoying the attention.  
  
“ _Amazing_ between your legs. Riding her just feel right, ya know?”  
  
Rumlow and the rookie nodded enthusiastically and made sounds of agreement.  
  
Natasha shoved her chair back and stood, jealousy burning too hot in the pit of her stomach to listen to Clint for one more second.  
  
“Just shut up, Barton!”  
  
He scowled as the junior agent cowered beside him.  
  
“What’s your problem, Tash?” 

“You know what my problem is. You’re choosing _that_ over me. It’s stupid.”  
  
The agents at the nearest tables had paused to watch. She felt her cheeks heat up.  
  
“Hey, I invited you to come along. You don’t get to ruin this for me. Besides, Fury assigned you the new Corvette two weeks ago! It’s my turn.”  
  
She spun on her heel and stalked from the cafeteria. Corvettes were a dime a dozen. Clint’s new Ducati bike was a prototype. Fury gave him all the best toys.


	7. Tattoo Followup

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Requested sequel to chapter 4, so you might want to read that first.

"Ran into Cap in the elevator," Clint announced. Natasha spun and feigned surprise at seeing him back, even though JARVIS had informed her the instant Clint pulled into the parking garage. "No luck with Barnes, huh?"

"Bad intel," she shrugged. "How was Genovia?"

"Everyone there was very... _nice_ ," Clint said, distaste wrinkling his nose. "Milk run. Picked up Stark's missing tech at customs, in and out, ten minutes. Booo-ring."

There wasn't anyone else on the common floor, so she pulled Clint into a hug and smiled against his shoulder as he dropped a kiss against the top of her head. She had been right. Being officially _together_ with Clint made separate missions easier somehow, with the promise of a reunion at the end.

"Hey!" he said brightly, unceremoniously abandoning her in favor of checking out the stove. "Taco Tuesday!"

He took up her spatula and stirred the meat she'd been working on for the past half hour.

"Steve went out for tortillas," she told him, and took the spatula back. "You can do cheese and veggies."

The task would place him at the kitchen island, right where she wanted him.

Clint raided the fridge and set to chopping lettuce and tomatoes and grating a block of Tony's fancy cheese. Natasha waited until he grew sufficiently bored with the job, then moved to the side a bit and stood on her toes, reaching into the cabinet for the dish they always dumped the taco meat in. She made a show of it, stretching just so, making sure her shirt rode up in the back. She shifted her weight and threw out one hip.

Clint made a strangled coughing sort of noise.

" _Natasha_!"

"Hmm?" she replied, innocently enough, pausing to look over her shoulder with one arm still extended. Clint all but threw his barstool out of the way and charged across the kitchen.

"What the hell?" he demanded. He came up behind her and planted his hands on her hips, holding her steady as he examined the new tattoo. "I wasn't serious!"

The yoga pants barely covered her ass, so he had an eyeful of the heart with an arrow through it, positioned dead center just over the waistband.

"Natasha," he repeated faintly. He ran a hand through his hair and shook his head. Took a step back. Turned. Exhaled.

"You don't like it," she assessed, adding just a hint of a waver behind her otherwise neutral tone.

"It's...well, if it's what you wanted..." he backpedaled quickly. He came back and gave it a second look, brushing his fingers over the letters in the middle.

She felt him tense behind her, and bit her lip hard to stop herself laughing.

"Hawkguy," he said blankly. He spun her around to face him. "Hawk _guy_? Real funny, Red!"

She laughed then, an undignified sound with a snort at the end, and ducked out of the way as he made a grab for her. Clint was laughing too, as she had known he would. He had proven years ago that he could appreciate a good prank.

She didn't expect him to dive over the kitchen island, so she was too late to dodge as he tackled her. She yelped and they slammed onto the tile floor. Clint flattened her, pinned her arms above her head and straddled her hips, and she didn't counter, only grinned up at him panting.

"Still funny?" he demanded, laughing despite the serious tone he tried to put on. He shifted his grip on her wrists, holding her with only one hand, and used the other to poke her in the ribs. She squirmed and made an effort to break his hold. "Yeah? Ha-ha, let's all get ' _Hawkguy'_ tattooed on our asses."

"Tramp stamp," she corrected him, giggling. He jabbed her ribs again.

"Am I interrupting?"

She sobered at once, because the Black Widow absolutely didn't _giggle_ in front of her teammates.

Steve stared down at her, eyebrows arched almost into his hairline.

"Nope," Clint replied easily. "Just teaching Nat a lesson."

"Good," Steve said, a slow grin pulling his mouth up at one corner. He tossed a plastic bag on the island and began unpacking the groceries. "Give her one from me. I'm gettin' real tired of the fossil cracks."

"You're still stuck on the terrible dad jokes?" Clint asked.

She used his distraction as an opportunity to hook her legs around his waist and flip him, scrambling gracefully out of reach as he slid across the floor. She wouldn't put it past him to pin her down and show Steve the temporary tattoo. Explaining the significance of the prank wasn't on her agenda.

She hiked the yoga pants up and mumbled a quick excuse about changing before dinner, Clint's challenging ' _Yeah, you'd better run_!' echoing down the corridor after her. By the time she returned, dressed in jeans and one of Clint's old t-shirts, the evidence of the tattoo scrubbed off with nail polish remover, the kitchen was packed. She squeezed in between Pepper and Sam to make a plate, then moved to the big sofa in the next room to take her place between Clint and Thor.

Steve ambushed her as she was leaving the kitchen, a giddy smirk splitting his face.

"So, Nat. You were so good about trying to set me up, I've decided to return the favor. If you're not already taken."

He let the offer hang between them, watching her expectantly. Her stomach dropped. Clint had told Steve everything, and the asshole wanted to hear her confirm it.

"Thought your barbershop quartet were all dead, Rogers," she replied, and okay, it came out a little more savage than she intended. Steve's expression faltered.

"Natasha-"

She brushed past him and moved smoothly over to Clint. Her plate rattled on the coffee table as she set it down harder than was entirely necessary, and Thor leaned subtly away and closer to Jane on his left when she sat.

"You told him," Natasha accused quietly. She wasn't even sure why it mattered. All eyes were on them now, despite her attempt at discretion.

"Told him what?" Tony asked interestedly. "What does Cap get to know that the rest of us don't?"

"Classified," Natasha said at once.

"We're a thing now," Clint mumbled around a mouthful of taco, giving an unconcerned shrug. He turned to her. "You never said I couldn't tell them. I believe the only condition was that I couldn't use the term 'girlfriend' because we're not twelve-year-olds."

Most of the team openly gaped at them. Pepper gave her a cautious, encouraging smile.

"You guys haven't always been a thing?" Darcy asked curiously. "You're always making sex eyes at each other."

"Congratulations," Thor told her, and while she expected the usual earsplitting enthusiasm, he surprised her by speaking softly. "A worthy match between two fine warriors. May you fight well and die side-by-side in battle."

She wasn't entirely sure if the sentiment was traditional Asgardian or simply a joke, she couldn't always tell with Thor, but he lifted his beer bottle briefly in salute with a wide smile.

"I'll drink to that," Clint said, and reached across her to knock his bottle against Thor's. "Are we watching this or not?"

"Play it, JARVIS," Tony ordered. The Sharknado 2 title card rolled across the flat screen mounted on the opposite wall.

Money changed hands over the course of the evening, twenty dollars between Sam and Rhodey, a five between Pepper and Darcy, Tony slapped two hundreds down on the table in front of Bruce with a scowl. Aside from that and a few sidelong glances, the rest of the team seemed to accept it without question.

Natasha felt the tight curl of anxiety in her chest ease as it became clear the dynamic between them all wasn't affected. It appeared most of the team had suspected either she and Clint were secretly dating or would be eventually. No smart remarks from Tony, no secretive smiles from the girls, just Taco Tuesday and a shitty movie, par for the course.

Steve passed behind the couch on his way to the kitchen and she turned and caught his sleeve.

"Sorry about earlier," she said quietly.

"I shouldn't have teased you about it," he said with a shrug. He gave her shoulder a little squeeze and she felt forgiven. "But I noticed that necklace months ago. For a spy, you're not very subtle."

He grinned and moved out of range before she could take a swipe at him.

Later, settled in Clint's bedroom, a new kind of nervousness gripped her, a shyness and hesitancy she wasn't accustomed to feeling. He slipped deft hands under her shirt and tossed it in a heap on the floor, peppering slow kisses down her neck and across her stomach. He worked the button on her jeans as he moved lower. He tugged them over her hips and she went still, holding her breath and waiting for his reaction.

Clint sat back on his heels, breath a little labored as he cocked his head to one side.

"What's up?" he asked. She chewed her lip. "Do you want me to stop?"

He hadn't been pleased with the fake tattoo. She hoped he only meant he hadn't been serious about the arrow heart, and not the entire concept.

She blew out a breath and hooked one finger under the waistband of her underwear. She pulled them away just enough to reveal the real tattoo, a tiny black arrow burned into her hip.

"I don't get it," Clint said after a moment.

"This one doesn't come off," she informed him.

" _Oh._ " He ran callused fingers over the new mark, eyes a little brighter than usual as he beamed happily at her. "You didn't have to."

"I wanted to," she assured him. "And it hasn't gotten me killed yet, so I guess it's not so bad."

He kissed her and she could feel him smiling.

"Any more surprises, Romanoff?" he whispered against her neck, nipping her ear.

She locked her legs around his hips and reversed their position. She could come up with a few.


	8. Bomb

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This time my prompt came from a reviewer on ff.n:  
> how about one where Clint has to diffuse a bomb strapped to Natasha and both get really scared. 
> 
> So ta-da. Here's a bomb. c:

"Time?" Clint asked. His tone was calm, unconcerned, as if he were asking about the oven timer on a frozen pizza.

"Five minutes," Natasha replied, only flicking her eyes to the flashing red numbers for an instant before going back to staring at the dark hallway beyond the interrogation room. The little countdown box blinked tauntingly in her peripheral vision.

Clint had detached the timer first, sat it near her knee so she could feel useful by keeping him informed of the minutes. The timer had started at fifteen. By the time Clint burst into the room with a smirk and a _'This looks bad._ ' it had blinked down to nine.

"So what's our takeaway here?" he prompted.

"Don't piss off the terrorists," she recited dutifully.

"Or?"

"Or we end up wearing bombs."

"Good girl," he replied, and ruffled her hair from behind.

Nobody had bothered to tell the aforementioned terrorists it was impossible to extract information from the Black Widow. And her silence had led to them bashing her over the head and forcing her into a bulletproof vest (ironic?) with a bomb strapped to the back. Not the most creative 'fuck you' she'd ever received.

"Four minutes," she intoned, and glanced over her shoulder.

"Impatient," Clint accused. "I can't do it with you watching me."

She huffed and went back to staring into the hallway. She'd be hearing about this for at least a month. There would be reenactments from Clint in the cafeteria. Coulson would turn it into a cautionary tale for junior agents. She detested being used as the moral of a story.

"Three," she told him, and her stomach clenched with a little flutter of nerves. Clint was better than she was at the whole diffusing bombs thing, and she'd never seen him take six minutes to get the job done before.

"Yeah, I got it," he snarled. Then, quietly, "Sorry, Tash."

He gave her shoulder a brief squeeze.

"Clint-"

"It's okay. I've just never seen one rigged like this before."

The new tension behind the words gave him away. This time, he didn't know how to save her.

"Clint," she said again, insistently. Two minutes thirty. Her throat stung, threatened to close up, and she swallowed hard past the sensation that warned of tears. "You need to go. You still have time to get clear."

"No way," he shot back. His breath came in sharp bursts, and she knew from the irregular staccato he was beginning to panic.

"Clint." She reached back and caught his hand. He gave up the bomb with an anguished little whine and shuffled around until he was crouched in front of her instead of kneeling behind.

He held her face between his hands, calloused fingers rough on her cheeks, and kissed her forehead, then her lips. He pulled her to him, tucked her against his chest. She twined her arms tightly around him, one small hiccuping sob betraying her before she locked it down.

As far as goodbyes went, it wasn't the worst she had imagined for them. She'd always thought there would be more blood, gunfire, screaming. The calm stillness was somehow harder.

He couldn't really hold her, not the big enveloping hug that made her feel safe and invincible. He draped an arm around her shoulders, twisted his other hand into her curls, rested his forehead against her hair.

"Tasha," he whispered, voice cracking.

"You can go," she assured him, pleased that she managed to mask the tremor in her voice. If Clint knew she was the least bit frightened, she'd never get him out of the room.

Clint was too good to go down like this, in a dirty, damp compound in the middle of nowhere. Clint fought until the end, always refused to accept defeat. He hadn't been taught that sometimes, sacrifices had to be made for the greater good.

But Natasha had been trained for every inevitability. She had been trained to swallow cyanide pills, had been made to practice squeezing the trigger of an empty gun until the click in her ear and the vibration of the barrel against her temple no longer unnerved her. A bomb blast would probably be just as quick.

"You're an idiot, Romanoff," he said with a humorless little chuckle. He pulled back, held her at arms length with both hands on her shoulders. "Strike Team Delta. What's a Strike team with one person? What's left for me if I walk out of this compound?"

She shook her head but didn't argue with him. The cruel, selfish impulse to keep him with her until the end made her tears fall in earnest, and she hated herself. Hated that the one time it counted, she couldn't maintain her masks and covers. Hated Clint for changing her.

"So this is how I repay my debt? Getting you killed?"

"I'm not going to spend our last..." he consulted the timer "...forty-five seconds arguing about your imaginary debt," Clint told her with a scowl.

He kissed her again, hard and deep, and when he pulled away there was a new determination shining behind his eyes.

"There's a blue wire. If I pull it I'll either shut down the bomb or blow us to hell, can't figure out which. So you're going to count me down from five, I'm gonna pull it on one, and we'll see what happens."

Hope flickered warm in her chest as Clint pulled her to him again, even though she tried to remind herself there was no way out of this one. He looked over the top of her head and reached one hand back to grasp the wire.

She watched the seconds roll back until, "Five."

Clint got "Four."

"Let's hope this turns out better than Budapest," she said with a smile against his shoulder on three.

" _Nothing_ can be worse than Budapest," Clint muttered, and jerked the blue wire.


	9. Explosion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another one from a ff.n review, this time the prompt was Clint in an explosion and Natasha going in to save him.

Clint's voice was sharp in her ear, urging her faster as she sprinted down the length of the warehouse.

"Move it, Widow! You've got two on your six with grenades."

She skidded around a stack of shipping containers and tightened her grip on the little chrome box she'd swiped from the office upstairs.

Computer chips, housed in protective foam casing. She wasn't sure why they were important. Fury hadn't told her what she was retrieving, just described the box and sent them off to board the Quinjet.

Need-to-know missions always went to hell.

She could see Clint now, far ahead, a vaguely human shape under the harsh glow of fluorescent lights, perched on the catwalk that ran the perimeter of the warehouse.

"Fish in a barrel?" she suggested, and Clint groaned.

"Yeah, fine," he agreed grudgingly. "I'm always afraid you'll get shot on this one."

"That was _one time,_ " she muttered, her tone suggesting Clint should drop it; Steve's comm unit was also set to their channel.

"And I had to dig a bullet out of your ass cheek in the parking lot. Not something I want to experience again, thanks."

She heard a choked sort of noise, somewhere between a laugh and an expression of horror, that could only be Rogers. She scowled.

"Get it position, Barton."

He giggled - _giggled_ \- and gave her a snarky "10-4, boss."

She waited until he melted into the shadows, then peeked around her shipping container. The two men with grenades had called in reinforcements. There were six of them now, spreading out across the warehouse, dodging around crates and shipping containers with their guns drawn. She thought longingly of the stack of spare magazines stowed in the Quinjet, let her fingers brush briefly against the empty gun holstered at her hip.

She darted out in full view and began sprinting again. She threw in a theatrical limp, took little glances over her shoulder and let her eyes go wide with manufactured fear, breathed with audible, uncontrolled pants. The men pursued, as she knew they would. She let them close in. She brought them right up to Clint's last visible position and paused in the middle of an empty expanse of floor.

When she spun to face them, one hand extended in a placating gesture for mercy, they paused. They gave her identical feral grins. One identified himself as the leader by stepping forward and leveling his gun at her head. He growled an order for her to slide the box across the floor.

Clint dropped him and three of his buddies - _onetwothreefour_ \- with precise shots through the eye. The bodies thudded to the ground almost simultaneously. The other two bolted.

She waited for Clint to say it, waited for him to put on the cheesy Midwestern drawl that somehow always made her smile.

_Like shootin' fish in a barrel, sweetheart._

He kept uncharacteristically silent. She tilted her head back and scanned the catwalk, traced the trajectory of his kill shots with her eyes, but couldn't find him.

"Nat," he called urgently. His voice was loud in her earpiece and echoed faintly around the cavernous warehouse, too. "Nat, get clear, _now._ Go!"

They'd been partners long enough that she didn't question him.

There was an access door a hundred yards back the way she'd come. She sprinted again, hugging the wall, dodging pallets and crates, until she slammed through the door and into the cool night beyond the warehouse. Clint hadn't said _get out_ , he'd said _get clear_ , so she kept running.

She made it ten lunging paces before a rush of heat washed over her. She looked back in time to witness the burst of light and noise that signaled the end of the warehouse.

The force of the concussive explosion threw off her balance; she fell and glanced her head against the concrete, and the too-bright flames dimmed to grey. When her focus sharpened again her head was pounding and the ear with the comm unit was ringing.

"Natasha?"

Clint.

At least she hadn't been shot in the ass this time.

She pushed herself up to sit, blinking hard to clear her vision as her partner advanced at a run. Only...

Wrong teammate.

Not Clint. Steve.

Steve, who had been playing lookout, guarding the perimeter, tagging along to finish the mandatory supervised training that would make him an official S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. (No exceptions made for Captain America, he had to jump through hoops like everyone else.)

Her focus shifted beyond Steve and fixed instead on the burning warehouse. Nausea and panic twisted her gut.

"Natasha," he said again. He dropped to his knees and gripped her shoulder, gave her a little shake.

"Clint's in there," she said without thinking. It was her rule to break, anyway: only using codenames or last names when they were paired with the other Avengers, to keep them from knowing how deeply her relationship with Clint ran. Just until she felt them out, she had promised Clint, just until she had made sure their new team wouldn't use their closeness against them.

She pressed the comm unit in her ear. It whined with feedback that made her wince, but she rode it out until the sound transitioned to soft static.

"Hawkeye?" she barked, and waited. More static. "Barton, what's your position?" Silence. "Clint, goddammit!"

"Easy," Steve admonished. He ran his fingers through her hair, but there was nothing intimate about the gesture. He found the spot where her head had connected with the ground, assessing the wound with a precise, gentle touch. His fingers came away bloody and he frowned. "You wait here. I'll go find Barton."

"Like hell," she snarled back. She surged to her feet and brushed past him, ignoring the way the warehouse tilted to one side before her and how uneven the ground felt beneath her boots.

Steve didn't know Clint. He didn't know the other half of Strike Team Delta, he hadn't been on enough missions to earn their own special brand of blind trust, he hadn't learned to instinctively predict Clint's next move. She and Clint were a unit, a package deal. Clint was alive because _of course_ he was. All she had to do was find him. She was the only one who could find him. Partners didn't leave each other behind.

Still. She couldn't quite spur herself into a run as she moved toward the flames and smoke. An old fear uncoiled in her chest and slowed her steps.

Steve caught her arm.

The only thought in her head was Steve's voice echoing ' _You wait here_ ' as she freed the last taser disk from her belt and slammed it against Steve's chest. He faltered and she wrenched away, and this time she ran.

The access door had been blown off. Convenient. She drew a last deep, shuddering breath, forced away the old fear and memories, then plunged into the warehouse.

She could hardly see three feet in front of her. Her eyes stung and the breath scorched in her lungs, she brushed against a shipping container and earned a shiny burn to the forearm, but she pressed doggedly on, maneuvering carefully toward the end of the warehouse where she'd last seen Clint. He had obviously moved on from his original position, but instead of wandering with no direction, she decided to start there.

Her next blind step came down unevenly, the ground rolling and crunching beneath her boot. She knelt and wrapped trembling fingers around the shaft of an arrow, the usually cool metal warm against her skin.

She ran her hands through the pile, identifying each by touch, by the unique arrowhead or fletching. Explosive arrows and acid arrows and electric shock arrows and ordinary shoot-em-through-the-heart arrows. She found the strap of the quiver next, the leather snapped. The ends of the break were ragged, not cut cleanly with a blade. Her chest went tight and she wasn't sure if it was from fear or the smoke.

Something had gone wrong.

A smaller explosion from the other end of the warehouse, a hot draft of dry air, and the smoke thinned just long enough for her to cast her eyes up for more clues.

The catwalk overhead was mangled, thin beams twisted and metal grating melted.

A cord dangled from the ceiling, and she could make out the frayed, broken fibers and a dull glint of silver that was a grappling arrow stuck in the roof.

"Natasha!"

The shout was muffled over the rush of flames. Relief made her shoulders sag, and she reflexively gripped the arrow she still held a little tighter. She spun in the direction of the voice, saw a dark form advancing through the smoke and falling ash. Then she heard the thrumming reverberation of steel beam on Vibranium shield.

Wrong teammate.


	10. Footsie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Short one from a list of NSFW Tumblr prompts: Footsie during a meeting. It's SFW I promise.

Natasha startled as the pen shot across the table and into her lap. Clint caught her eye, waggled his eyebrows.

She slid the pen back and arched a brow in return.

“Alpha team takes position at 1300 hours….” Fury droned on, probably too accustomed to their antics by now to even bother admonishing them. She turned her attention back to the dossier open on the table in front of her. Fury’s much thicker file overlapped hers at the corner, wedged as tightly as they were beside each other at the skinny cafeteria table for the briefing.

Clint coughed, and this time when she looked up he cocked his head to one side and gave her a smirk.

God, what was with him? The biggest operation they’d had in months and he wasn’t even paying attention.

“Beta team waits on standby to provide air support and….”

‘This is important,’ she signed, and gave him a frown. Clint unfolded his hands from where they rested atop his own unopened file.

‘So is this.’

He slumped a little in his seat. Natasha studied him intently, but didn’t get it. What was important? Poor posture? Inattention? Going into the operation completely unprepared?

“Delta team,” Fury said pointedly.

Natasha aimed a kick at Clint under the table, then sat straight and dutifully waited for Fury’s explanation of their orders.

Across the table, Clint’s eyes had gone wide and panicked. Odd. Her foot hadn’t connected with anything vital.

She kicked him again, furrowed her eyebrows in silent question. This time Clint made an odd keening noise. He signed one word across the table, over and over, fingers shaking.

'Dead. Dead. Dead.’

Natasha warily scanned the cafeteria, her pulse jumping as adrenaline spiked. Three full STRIKE teams crowded the space, in addition to Fury and Hill and a handful of others.

Had Clint’s sharp eyes noticed something she’d missed? Rogue agent, maybe?

A swelling murmur of voices signaled the end of the meeting. She had missed Fury’s closing remarks. He stood, and the noise of his chair scraping across the floor started a new round of noise as the other agents followed suit.

“Agent Barton,” Director Fury added, pushing his chair in and turning to leave, “I would like to remind you that you’re not my type.”

Clint’s forehead whapped the table with a dull thud.


	11. Moaning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another one from the nsfw Tumblr prompt list: moaning the other person's name.

"...Clint?"

It's a pitiful sound even to her own ears, her voice low and tinged with a desperate note of confusion, and she's pretty sure the soft little moan is lost amid the muffled throb of klaxon alarms.

"Don't move, Tash."

He sounds far away, but he enunciates each word strong and clear, and she catches on. She breathes instead, cloying air that tastes hot and cold all at once and burns her throat. Smoke, and jet fuel, and snow.

She drags herself up from the black depths of unconsciousness and forces her eyes open. It’s an action she immediately regrets. She’s looking down, down on the dark points of pine trees dusted in white, and a bare length of grey rock, and then dark nothing shrouded in twilight. She startles, and the trees sway, and it takes her a long moment to realize the trees aren’t actually moving, it’s the Quinjet rocking softly forward and back. She swallows down a little swell of nausea.

Clint isn’t in the pilot seat beside her, where he belongs. The interior of the jet is hazy with smoke. The alarms whine in an off-key sort of way, control panels flashing urgent messages with lights that become steadily dimmer as she watches.

"They shot us down," she snarls indignantly, and Clint gives a humorless little laugh.

"Hail Hydra," he confirms wryly, and when she glances back to find him he's got two middle fingers raised. "Don't move," he warns again. "Not until you're steady."

"What's our play?" she asks to kill time, because she's pretty certain she'd stumble and send the Quinjet pitching into the ravine if she attempted to stand. She directs her eyes away from the view out the window, wills her mind to stray back toward their mission and not how unpleasant the hundreds-feet drop would be.

"Grappling arrow, if we can get the emergency hatch open. Have yours ready as a backup."

She checks her gauntlets, but the grappling hook and thin cord hidden inside were designed specifically for her. They weren't made to support two, and Clint knows it, and she doesn't like his sacrifice-myself-for-Tasha contingency plan.

“We lost the team,” he adds. “Comms are still patched through the Quinjet’s communication system, and I can’t get our earpieces to work.”

The information doesn’t bother her, and she knows Clint isn’t telling her because he’s concerned. He’s briefing her, giving her the updated mission parameters. A crashed jet and no backup is cake compared to some of their other experiences.

Slowly, painfully slowly, she flips open the compartment in the console to her right and draws out a flare gun; J.A.R.V.I.S. can track the beacon in the nose of the jet to approximate their location, and they’ll need a way to signal Tony in the dark. Then she starts on the harness: squeeze the buckle and hold, slide one arm free and hold, other arm free but don't stand, not yet.

"Come over the side," Clint says, and the tremor in his voice gives her nervous butterflies. She swings her legs over the armrest, braces one hand on the back of the seat, and glides fluidly to her feet.

The Quinjet groans and scrapes against the ice, but doesn't slide off the cliff. She holds her breath, and Clint swears under his.

"Easy," he says at last, and she shuffles forward. "The edge is just in front of the wing."

Only one wing, she remembers now. Hydra would have blasted the Quinjet in two if not for Clint's barrel roll.

She passes into the section of the cabin that rests on solid ground, and the low grinding and creak of metal stops. The Quinjet settles with a final crunch of snow.

Natasha takes a moment to observe the back of the cabin, just in case Clint’s overlooked something. He keeps quiet and gives her time for the assessment, and despite all Steve’s preaching about teamwork and cooperation, she knows none of the others would tolerate second-guessing if they’d already decided on an escape plan.

The back ramp is tilted open a few inches but obviously jammed, and there’s a breach in the hull near the blasted-off wing. The emergency hatch in the ceiling is still their best option. Clint can’t fit through either of the other spaces, and she’d have to lose the utility belt and gun holsters to squeeze through herself.

“Let’s go,” she says.

“You’re up.”

Clint crouches under the escape hatch, so very close to the half of the jet hanging over the cliff. She throws her legs over his shoulders and balances carefully as he rises, not quite standing straight to prevent her banging her head on the ceiling. Tony’s latest design is stupid, ceiling too high for one person to open the emergency hatch alone but too low for a stand-on-the-shoulders solution. She’s glad the jet’s probably going to end up at the bottom of the cliff.

She pops the latch and pushes the little door away, and at least Tony installed it with a breakaway option instead of hinges. Clint lifts her the rest of way through, she maneuvers and reaches back inside to grip his hands, and then they’re sitting together on the roof of the Quinjet, breathing hard more out of nerves than exertion.

“We’ve already gone over one cliff,” she observes, and looks up the sheer rock face behind them.

“Just a little one. Barely even counts.”

He’s right, and the drop is comparatively tiny considering what waits in front of them. Twenty feet, maybe, and they’re standing on the jet, so they really only have to climb ten.

Clint nocks his arrow and aims at the ledge above them. He hits some unseen target and the cord snaps taut, and she’s practical enough to loop her arms around his neck and hook her legs around his hips so he can haul them up to safety.

That doesn’t mean she can’t feel indignant about being relegated to the useless damsel role. She directs her energy into winding Clint up, because that always makes her feel better.

“Join the Avengers,” she mutters in his ear with a slow little smile, “live on the _edge_ , reach new _heights_ -"

“Natasha,” Clint moans in disgust. “One more and I’ll drop you, I swear."


	12. Prompt: Shimmer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did not wake up this morning intending to destroy people with words, but here ya go.

Natasha threatens, bribes, even begs, and the Maximoff girl always breaks. A shimmer of red at the edges of her vision, a color that once held so many negative connotations, but now, now it’s her favorite. 

This time she finds herself not in Budapest, or on a Quinjet, or tangled in bed in a safe house, but in a painfully familiar apartment in Bed Stuy. She wanders across the loft bedroom, padding barefoot across the threadbare rug and brushing her fingers over the scarred surface of the dresser before taking the stairs two at a time. 

Clint leans against the kitchen counter, coffee cup in hand, and he gives her a warm, genuine smile as she trots to meet him. 

“Think those are mine,” he mumbles, and tugs the waistband of the boxers she wears before dipping his head to kiss her. His hand settles on her hip, lithe fingers sliding between fabric and skin, and a pleasant shiver runs through her at the teasing touch. She melts against him, grinning against his bare chest, and his coffee cup makes a hollow _clunk_ on the counter as he sets it aside. 

“Think I’ll have to take ‘em back,” he growls, just the hint of a chuckle behind the words. He wraps her in a bear hug and nips her ear with his teeth, and she laughs too and pinches the tender spot beneath his armpit until he lets her go with an exaggerated ‘ _Ow_!’. 

She throws him a raised-eyebrow challenging expression and darts away, eyes on the loft. She makes it two lunging steps before his arms are around her, pinning her back against his chest. Her feet leave the tile as he lifts her and twirls her, and he sits her on the counter beside his coffee and kisses her again. 

“Too slow, Red,” he says, and ruffles her hair. 

She catches his hand and kisses his bruised knuckles - she wonders briefly why the bruises are there - then traces one finger along the line of his jaw, rough with stubble he hasn’t bothered shaving yet. 

“I lov-” she begins, but….

“Natasha, this isn’t healthy.” 

Clint’s lips move with the words but it’s Steve’s voice that echoes, and when she opens her eyes she’s back in her bedroom on base, curled on her side, Steve’s face inches from her own as he crouches beside the bed. He’s opened the blinds over the window, but everything here seems dull despite the big shaft of sunlight burning the polished floor. The other place, the place in her head where Clint still exists, that’s real, that’s home, vibrant with color and smells and the light scrape of calloused fingers against her skin. 

She sucks in a shaky breath and draws on a wavering reserve of strength, an inclination to move that only manifests when she needs to find Wanda. She slips out of bed, not bothering to acknowledge Steve as his fingers brush her forearm. The too-big leather jacket resting on the chair by the door finds it’s way around her shoulders and she’s escaped down the hallway, the faint lingering scent of his cologne spurring her forward, and she feels a bit of the old spark come back, well-honed senses awakening, just long enough to determine where Wanda might be hiding and track her down. 

Maybe this will destroy her, and maybe then she can be with Clint again.


	13. Prompt: Help

She stands panting in a room that was never literally red, despite the organization’s name, but certainly is now, an elegant foyer splattered with blood and decked in carnage.

She doesn’t feel remorse, and nor does she feel any of the other emotions she expected. It’s done, every name on her list a gruesome smear on the walls or a growing puddle of blood beneath her boots, and she observes and doesn’t feel.

“You didn’t need my help,” he says softly behind her. “Not even sure why you made me tag along.”

She turns and he’s there, bow slung over one shoulder. She sees and looks past him to the dining room, to old rivals draped over the mahogany table.

“Natasha?” he prompts.

“Natalia.”

The correction slips out unbidden as her focus slides to the girls lying in a tumbled heap at the foot of the stairs.

“Natasha,” he says firmly. He plants one hand on her shoulder and cups her chin with the other, forcing her to meet his eyes. He holds her gaze with a fierce determination, and she feels everything and it threatens to destroy her. “Let’s go home.”

And this, this is why she dragged him halfway around the world on an errand that was never his. So he could bring her back.


	14. Prompt: Hide

Natasha likes them, she really does. Steve’s nice and Bruce doesn’t feel the need to fill silences with chatter and Pepper’s always good for a trip to Barney’s and even Tony has somehow managed to endear himself. Natasha likes them, but every Thursday her contempt runs a little deeper.

Thursday nights are pizza and a new episode of Dog Cops. Thursdays, barring a mission, are for sweats and blankets and leaning into Clint’s shoulder on the sofa. The Avengers and their hangers-on are stealing her partner.

Thursdays at the newly-christened Avengers Tower are beer and poker, and Clint likes it. Thursdays at Avengers Tower are too much space on her couch and unread books and immature sulking.

The elevator dings, but Clint knows her private floor almost better than his own (he’s the only one who’s ever intruded here) and she doesn’t bother to go meet him. She doesn’t look up from the computer at all until Clint’s standing in front of her, arms crossed and scowling.

“What is it this time?” he asks.

She saves things for Thursdays, lets excuses accrue, because one day maybe Clint will remember pizza and stupid reality shows and how she likes sitting with his arm slung around her shoulders.

Pathetic, she scoffs, and resolves to punish herself with two extra miles on the indoor running track tomorrow.

“Report for Hill,” she tells him, and it isn’t a lie. She conveniently forgot to submit her half of the report from their last mission. Clint frowns.

“What’re you doing, Tasha?” He sits at the opposite end of the couch, but doesn’t relax and lay his arm across the back in invitation. “You don’t think I’ve noticed how you hide up here every week? Everyone’s noticed.”

“I’m busy,” she says pointedly, and flips the laptop around so he can see her half-written report.

“You’re busy on purpose,” Clint accuses. She sneers a little and starts typing again.

“These team building things are important,” he tries next. “You come to breakfast and paintball and Banner and Steve’s book club. Why is tonight any different?”

“It isn’t,” she lies. “It’s coincidence.”

“Twice is coincidence. Six Thursdays in a row is….”

He raises his eyebrows and gestures for her to fill in the rest of the sentence.

“I’m busy,” she says again, this time with the weight of dismissal. Clint darts a hand forward, slaps the laptop closed, and snatches it away. He sits a little straighter, squares his shoulders.

Thursdays aren’t supposed to be for fighting.

“They don’t leave us alone,” she says simply. Confusion furrows his brow.

“We get tons of alone time. Yesterday we played six hours of Mario Kart. Nobody bothered us.”

She makes a frustrated noise. None of their teammates bothered them, but they were still there. Steve in the kitchen, and Tony and Bruce drawing schematics for improved Iron Man armor atop the bar.

Clint likes belonging. Clint likes people and bonds and family, and he shifts and adapts in a way she never will. She likes the memories of their old routine better than the present.

“I’d rather go back to Washington.”

Another truth.

“Where is this coming fr-”

He pauses, pins her with a deadpan expression.

“Really?” he demands, and he’s figured her out so she averts her eyes to the opposite side of the room. “You’re an idiot, Romanoff.”

He discards the laptop on the floor, moves to sit beside her, and this time he does put an arm around her shoulders and pull her in close.

“You wanna watch Dog Cops,” he accuses, and she hates the sly little grin he gives her. “You think that’s our thing. We have approximately ten million things, d'you realize that?”

“We do not have-”

“Gelato every time we’re in Italy. Harry Potter marathon every September first. That thing with the souvenir fridge magnets. I eat your stuffed crust and you get half my pepperoni.”

He ticks them off on his fingers, and she ducks her head as six weeks worth of embarrassment for her sulking catches up to her. They have so many routines and rituals she couldn’t begin to name them all, and the large majority have remained intact through their relocation.

“That’s four, not ten million,” she mutters sourly.

“How much time do you have? I’d list more, but you’re so busy.”

She slugs him in the arm and he barks a laugh.

“Normal people talk about these things, you know.”

“Fine. Poker night sucks and I want to watch Dog Cops.”

“Counteroffer. One hour of poker night, we set the DVR, then order in a late dinner and have our Thursday thing. We aren’t Strike Team Delta here, we’re Avengers. And this way we can skip commercials. Deal?”

He’s right, although she’ll never tell him that. It isn’t smart to create rifts in a team so new.

“Deal,” she agrees, a little grudgingly, and lets him march her across the room and into the hallway to the elevator.

Tony’s brought in a real poker table covered in green velvet, and he’s parading around the common floor in a matching green visor. She should want to smile at his antics, but only wonders if Clint meant one hour of total poker playtime or just one solid hour of being present.

“Hey,” he says softly, and grips her forearm to stop her entering the living room. “We’re going out tomorrow, you and me. We’ll do the Met, grab a carriage ride through the park. That’s our playing tourist thing. We haven’t done that one since we got here.”

She gives him a real smile, and he presses a kiss against the top of her hair, and okay, one hour of poker night isn’t going to kill her.

“When we get back, we can do the shooting range thing,” she suggests, and goes to meet the rest of the team before he can protest.

“No!” he yelps behind her. “The shooting range thing always turns into the knife throwing thing! Natasha!”

And if her smile turns just a little devious, well, Clint did forget about Dog Cops Thursdays for almost two whole months.


	15. Prompt: Crave

“You gonna make it?” Clint asks.

“This sucks,” Nat snarls from across the cabin.

He snorts a laugh and dumps the can of Chicken & Stars into the pot on the stove.

“Recon sucks,” she continues. “Your stupid lumberjack shirt sucks. Coulson sucks. Oregon sucks.”

He doesn’t comment on the fact that she’s currently wearing the red flannel lumberjack shirt, so she can’t hate it as much as she claims.

He stirs the soup and sneaks little glances at Nat when she’s not looking. She’s layered his flannel under one of his hoodies, she’s wearing the big fleece blanket from the bed like a cape, and she’s got so much wood piled in the fireplace it’s probably a hazard. The undignified, hunched silhouette of his partner makes his lips curve into an affectionate smile.

The damp and cold always make her crave the opposite. He teases, but he also remembers the stories she’s told of years spent in cold rooms in a colder landscape.

He dumps the soup in a thermos (Tasha likes to drink her soup, she’s weird), then drags the comforter off the bed and joins her on the floor in front of the hearth.

She growls at the soup but accepts, and leans into his shoulder so he can wrap them both in the comforter.

“We could always raid the base tomorrow,” he suggests. “Forget the recon. Be home in time to grab dinner from that Thai place you like.”

It has the desired effect: Tasha relaxes against him and hums her agreement, a happy noise, a complete contrast to the sounds she’s been making for the past two days.

And okay, they don’t know the layout of the building, or how many guards, or even if the stolen missiles they’re looking for are there. The entire mission will probably go straight to shit. But….

“Let’s watch something,” Tasha says, and unfolds herself from beneath the blankets to move to the couch. She smiles at him, the first one he’s seen from her since the Quinjet touched down.

The clusterfuck mission tomorrow will suck, more than Oregon or recon or his lumberjack shirt, but it’s worth it.


	16. Prompt: Wedding

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt asked for a Clint/Nat "battle wedding" or alternatively just an "effed up" wedding. yEs i LoVE tHis.

"O-negative," Clint told the nurse with the clipboard.

Not Clint, no, he was Clark tonight. Clark and Natalie. Natalie Rushman, a familiar cover, easy to remember and maintain even with the pain pills Clint-Clark had forced on her in the car.

"Alright, Mr. Brandon, we'll get her prepped for surgery, and I'll send someone out to update you as soon as-"

Natasha leaned forward and planted her feet firmly on the floor, bringing the wheelchair to a halt. She looked over her shoulder, past the man in scrubs pushing the chair, past his wide eyes and confused expression.

The woman with the clipboard and Clint had paused on the threshold of the last set of double doors. The nurse had a hand planted firmly on Clint's arm, stopping him from entering the hallway.

What would Natalie do? Natasha knew what Natasha would do. She was about three seconds from walking out and leaving the damn bullet stuck in her thigh, fuck the blood loss and fuck Coulson's ordered ER visit.

"Excuse me," she said sweetly, and hauled herself out of the chair to stalk back to Clint and the nurse.

Her leg throbbed and she could feel blood soaking her jeans through the dressing Clint had taped down in back of the car. Clint I-can't-find-the-bullet Barton. Useless asshole.

"-and you aren't Miss Rushman's spouse or immediate family, so I'm afraid you'll have to wait here."

"But we're partners," Clint protested. Natasha gave him an incredulous look over the nurse's shoulder as she approached. That always worked at S.H.I.E.L.D. facilities, but civilian hospitals weren't in the habit of making exceptions.

"Partners?" the nurse echoed, a suspicious note to her tone.

"We're officers," he added lamely. "Off duty."

Clint didn't panic often, and maybe the frantic way he was combining aliases and covers was the only reason she wasn't freaking out. Natalie Rushman certainly had never been a police officer, off duty or otherwise. Clark Brandon was a goddamn investment banker.

"I think I'll keep the bullet, thank you," Natasha told the nurse, and lifted the clipboard full of Natalie's information from her hands. "Let's go, _Clark_."

She hooked her arm around his and made to walk back the way they'd come, but he didn't follow. He took the clipboard and passed it back to the nurse.

"Come on, Nat," he muttered softly. He led her a couple paces away to make the conversation private. "You heard Phil, we're on our own until tomorrow. The closest safe house is four hours away, no extraction. I can't fix you up this time. I tried and I made it worse."

An icy shock of fear rippled through her chest, and she shook her head and backed a step away.

"Nat. Nat, please."

"Not without you," she whispered, still shaking her head and hating the tremor in her voice. Clint blew out a breath.

"Okay," he said softly. He turned back to the nurse. "If we were married, I could go back with her, right?"

"Yes, but-"

"Perfect. Nat?"

He swung her arm around his shoulder and strode back down the hallway, every bit the focused sniper now.

"Mr. Brandon!" the nurse called after them, and Natasha listened to her running to catch up.

Clint paused at the nurses' station and reached over the counter. He straightened up with a paperclip and a handful of Hershey's Kisses from a candy dish, nodded once toward the main lobby, and left Natasha to keep pace beside him as he worked. She watched him bend the paperclip into a near-perfect circle, then he started on the foil candy wrappers. He passed her the chocolate as he opened each one, then twisted the foil bits together.

Natasha grinned and popped the chocolates into her mouth, irrational fears long since gone. It wasn't the craziest idea he'd ever come up with. It was better than being dragged into the bowels of the hospital and sedated without him.

They stopped again in the middle of the lobby. Clint turned a slow circle, scanning the faces of the people sitting in the small clusters of chairs around the room.

"Knew I saw one around here," he muttered, and pulled her arm back around his shoulders. The unsuspecting priest was occupied reading _Better Homes & Gardens_ in a chair along the far wall. "Keep up!" he growled back at the clipboard nurse. "We'll need a witness."

Natasha tried to put on a pleasant, vapid smile and slip back into Natalie. She really tried. But when they approached the priest and Clint said "Sorry to bother you, Father, but-" she broke into an uncharacteristic fit of giggles. Probably the blood loss.

"You're bleeding, dear," the priest said, and stood to lay a soft hand on her shoulder. There was something kind behind his eyes, and also a faint hint of polite curiosity, and Natasha let him keep the hand rather than break it.

"It's her fault," she replied, and jerked a thumb at the nurse.

"Hospital policy," Clint spat. "Look, my fiance's terrified of doctors and they won't let me - what?"

She tugged his sleeve and arched a brow.

"Right. Sorry, one second," he said to the priest. The man watched, lips pressed into an amused smile, as Clint dropped to his knees in front of her. "Nat, you're the light of my life, etcetera etcetera, I can't breathe when you're gone, my life is a void without you, whatever. Wanna get hitched?"

"You're not bad in bed," she conceded, and held out her hand. Clint slid the paperclip over her finger.

"Anyway," he continued, and got to his feet, "she won't go back without me. She's so stubborn she'll stand in this lobby and bleed out if they won't let me go with her, and they won't let me back there unless we're married, so-"

"What happens after tonight?" the priest asked, and gave them a stern expression. "Will you have the marriage annulled?"

After tonight they would go back to S.H.I.E.L.D. and debrief and...what? She hadn't even considered it. Clint hadn't, either, if his deer-in-the-headlights gaping was any indication.

Common sense told her to play it up, tell the priest what he wanted to hear, but that hadn't been Clark proposing to Natalie out of necessity. It was Clint proposing to Natasha, in the frank, blunt way their relationship worked. No flowery language or meaningless overt declarations of love.

This was Clint and _of course_ he loved her, and she loved him, and it didn't matter when exactly it had happened or how because they had always been drawn to each other. Clint was her axis and she was his. Ceremony and foil rings wouldn't alter the way she laid herself bare for him, or how he admitted things to her in the dark he never dared to tell anyone else.

They had never cared about confirming or denying anyone's suspicions about them. But she didn't want to simply tell the priest what he wanted to hear, either.

"No?" Natasha guessed, and looked to Clint for confirmation. He shrugged.

"We've been partners for almost ten years," he reasoned.

"We celebrate an anniversary," Natasha said, and couldn't help the distaste behind the words. It was ridiculous and something Clint insisted on, making a big deal about the day he brought her in.

"She already steals my clothes, and my apartment's full of her crap."

"We've got a joint Netflix account," Natasha added. "And a dog."

"I guess we're pretty much married, huh?" Clint said, sounding a little surprised as he grinned down at her.

"Do you ever have disagreements?" the priest asked.

"Only about twelve times a week," Clint replied. "Like I said, she's stubborn."

"And he's a reckless idiot," she countered. The priest scrutinized them closely.

"Alright," he agreed at last. He smiled again. "Where would you like me to perform the ceremony?"

"Let's make it count," Clint said, and indicated the small room off the lobby with a sign on the door that read _Chapel_.

It wasn't for weddings, instead for mourning and bargaining and sending up desperate pleas for mercy on behalf of dying relations, but Natasha didn't much care. Maybe a church built with death in mind rather than salvation was appropriate, given their line of work.

The room was tiny and dimly lit, crammed with three short benches, a table with candles, and a little altar at the front. There was only one other occupant, a man leaning forward with his head resting atop the back of the bench in front of him, hands clasped and raised. Clint tapped him on the shoulder.

"The Lord's omnipresent," Clint told the man, and slipped him a hundred dollar bill. "He'll hear you in the lobby."

"He isn't wrong," the priest said mildly, and oh, she liked him very much. The nurse simply looked scandalized.

The man considered the bribe for a moment, then took himself back to the lobby as instructed. Clint dragged her forward to stand parallel to the altar and passed her one of the two identical foil rings he held. He gave their names as Clark and Natalie and held her hands while the priest recited the beginning of the wedding ceremony.

The room dipped and swayed and her leg throbbed just a little harder, white needles of fire coursing out from the wound as the painkillers wore off. Clint was staring at her, eyebrows knit together in concern.

"Yes," she told him, because they were probably at that point, and he kissed her and she fell against him as tiny black stars winked at the edges of her vision.

"So we're married, right?" Clint asked.

"In the eyes of the Lord, if not the state," the priest agreed.

They'd forgotten the marriage license. Panic swelled again, until Clint scooped her into his arms.

"And God outranks _you_ , lady," Clint snarled at the nurse, "so get my wife taken care of."

He swept out of the room, and she dropped her head against his shoulder and closed her eyes. Clint wouldn't let a technicality keep them apart, not after all the trouble they'd just gone through.

"Can't wait to tell Coulson," she muttered.

"Yeah, it's your turn, alright," Clint agreed. She looked up in time to see him roll his eyes. "You made me explain the Turkish prison incident."


	17. Prompt: "I trusted you"

"Stupid," Barton growled, and pulled her up another few inches. She tried to plant her boots against the side of the building and push herself up, but the concrete facade was slick with rain and she only succeeded in making the line jerk in his grasp as her boots slipped.

"You can't-" a pause, while he readjusted his grip on the line, "fucking-" heavy panting, "throw yourself off buildings."

"You caught me," she replied, desensitized to Barton's lectures by now. He was always lecturing her. _Don't turn off your comm,_ and _keep the body count under ten this time_ , and _I can't cover you if you get into the mark's car._

"You jumped! I didn't have a choice!"

He grabbed the back of her catsuit and hauled her over the edge of the roof. She sprawled on her back and relished the release of tension in her arms, closed her eyes as the burn of exertion faded. Her hands stung where the cord from Barton's grappling arrow had sliced her palms.

"Fucking idiot. I could've shot you," Barton spat. The rain began again, little icy splashes across her cheeks and forehead. "I prayed, Natasha. Do you know how long it's been since I've actually honest-to-God prayed?"

"Two nights ago, while I went down on you in the safe house?"

"Fuck you."

She sat up to watch him pace along the edge of the roof. The rain picked up and she held her palms open, letting the water wash away the blood.

"Clint," she said softly. He froze and turned, fists clenched and shoulders set, but he didn't start railing at her again. She could count on one hand the number of times she'd called him Clint instead of Barton. It usually happened without her meaning it to. It accompanied the vulnerable feeling she sometimes got around him and seemed to always be a precursor to her admitting some childish emotional weakness.

He had learned to snap to attention when she did it.

"I trusted you."

He blinked, mouth hanging open as he searched for a reply. The fight went out of him. She watched his shoulders sag and his expression crumple with guilt and maybe a tiny bit of pity. He sighed and his breath rose in a cloud of mist.

He sat beside her and put an arm around her shoulders, the gesture somehow more intimate than the sex they'd gotten in the habit of having when they found themselves alone.

He squeezed her arm, fingers tightening against leather.

 _I'm sorry_.

She leaned into him.

_Still trust you._


	18. Prompt: "I can't breathe"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Angst was specifically requested this time. I think I've broken my Tumblr followers. :3

The ground drops out beneath her and she hits the freezing water with a yelp of surprise that isn't at all becoming of the Black Widow. The cold shocks the air from her lungs, numbing her fingers and toes almost instantly.

The river was frozen solid not fifteen minutes ago, so the hole has to be from a stray missile or repulsor blast, and if it's the repulsors she's going to absolutely murder Tony for compromising their escape route.

She kicks hard for the surface, but the frigid night air doesn't bite her cheeks as expected. She bangs her head against something hard and unyielding instead. Panic swells in her chest.

Panic won't get her out of the river. She clamps it down and forces her eyes open despite the stinging cold. The ice is black above her, but there, ahead, a lighter patch with jagged edges.

She kicks again, pulls herself toward the shaft of twilit water, limbs moving more on force of will than because she can actually feel them. She doesn't make progress. The escape route draws in on itself, becomes smaller, until she realizes the river has a current. A current stronger than her poor attempts at swimming.

 _Oh god_ , and _don't panic_ flash across her mind simultaneously. She swims, even without progress, because she wasn't trained to give up.

She doesn't give up, but her lungs burn and her chest aches and she can't think of a real way out. Her weapons are all useless. Useless if she wants to live, that is. She contemplates the Widow's Bites. Would electrocution be quicker, less painful, than drowning?

A flicker of shadow brings her back from that dark corner of her mind. One booted foot dips into the water, just for a moment, before drawing back.

_Clint._

And the terror sleeps. He almost fell in after her, but he knows about the hole in the ice. It's fine now. They'll laugh about it on the Quinjet later.

She fights her way toward him, still no progress, but the current doesn't sweep her further along either. Shadows flicker again as he brushes away the thin dusting of snow from the surface of the ice.

He starts near the breach, gloved fingers working methodically as he searches for her. She can't call his name to draw him closer, but she wills him to move further down the expanse of ice. Her strokes and kicks devolve into disjointed paddling.

His movements become frantic, and he gives up clearing a clean line of snow with his hands in favor of spot checking and scraping the snow away with his boots.

The seconds stretch, fear seeps in again to grip her heart, but he's drawn to her as always and his shadow looms over her.

Maybe he meets her eyes, she can't tell in the dark, but there's a determined set to his shoulders as he pulls an arrow and draws his bow. He aims a bit in front, and she sees how he means the rescue to go. Shoot out the ice, work with the current, pull her out. Easy.

She hasn't counted the seconds underwater, and wills herself not to start now; she's good for ninety, she knows that, while Clint always hits closer to the two minute mark in their S.H.I.E.L.D. evaluations.

It's been a minute, she decides firmly, as Clint looses the arrow. She can hold out another thirty seconds.

There's a flash and she feels the explosion ripple through the water, but there isn't the expected escape route. Clint takes a step forward and fires again, two arrows in quick succession.

Still nothing.

Clint charges forward and she follows without thinking. She wastes oxygen swimming with the current to reach him, and finds him on his knees.

The explosives left tiny cracks and fissures, all near the surface. The ice above her head feels smooth and unyielding when she runs her hand across it.

The end, then. She doesn't mind so much, except for being separated from Clint. He's safe, however, not hunkered over her body in a firefight or being tortured for information alongside her. A consolation.

The cold was always going to take her. She was born in it, raised in it, ice and snow flow in her blood. She resigned herself years ago to an end without warmth or comfort.

Clint sweeps more snow away, presses his palm flat against the ice above her. She watches his mouth move, his face distorted through the water, and she knows he's shouting for her even though she can't hear. She touches her hand briefly against his, and he stops yelling and starts pounding the ice with his fists instead.

It breaks her. It breaks him, too, and she aches for the fact that he'll have to live with this memory far longer than she will.

He leans down close, nose almost pressed to the ice, and this time she does catch his gaze. She tries to tell him everything she can't say, then in a foggy stroke of inspiration she signs to him, sloppy gestures with numb fingers, but he understands. He scrubs a hand across his eyes and shakes his head, and she knows he's got it.

 _It's okay_ and _I love you_ and _you saved me._

She tries to hold on for him, god how she tries, but it hurts so much, and even though she knows it won't work, Clint will despise her for giving up, she's been trained better than this, she gives in and lets her body suck in a reflexive breath.

Clint is warmth and air and home, Clint always drags her back into the light, but this time...this time….

_I can't breathe._

Everything's dark.


	19. Prompt: Puppy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As requested, here's how Clint & Nat acquired the dog mentioned in the wedding chapter. c: Enjoy and I swear nobody dies this time.

"Hawkeye, what's your position?"

Natasha looked back over her shoulder, meeting the disgruntled gazes of the other members of their team head on. The other six agents were already strapped into the jump seats, gear stowed and debrief packets in hand.

"Two minutes, Tash. Jeez."

She let it slide, only because everyone else had removed their comm units and they had the channel to themselves.

"Extraction was twenty minutes ago," she reminded him, and managed to keep the words level. Silence from Clint's end. "Barton."

"Two minutes."

"Do you need backup?"

"No!" he said, a little too quickly, a little too emphatically. "I'm just...ah...wrapping things up on my end."

 _Shit_. Barton code for 'I'm doing something that will land us both in Fury's office'.

She stepped down the ramp and around the side of the Quinjet.

"What's going on, Clint?"

" _Nothing_! Why does something have to be going on? Maybe I'm enjoying the scenery."

He couldn't see, of course, but she arched a brow and threw a glance at the burned out buildings and debris around the extraction point.

"Two minutes, or I'm coming to find you."

He must have believed the threat, because precisely two minutes later he rounded a corner a few blocks away and lifted a hand to wave at her. She expected him to run, or maybe walk briskly, since they were pushing thirty minutes sitting stationary in a hostile zone. He walked with carefully measured steps instead, occasionally pressing his hand against the big pocket on the side of his pants that usually held extra ammo.

Shot? It would explain his gait, and the cavalier way he tried to play off the late arrival to extraction. He heart dropped and her breath caught, and she jogged to meet him.

"I know, I know, I left you to deal with the team. Let's get outta here."

He gave her a grin and made to brush past her, but she took his arm to hold him back.

"What happened?" she asked. She looked him over, but couldn't find any blood on his tac suit. He rolled his eyes and twisted away.

"You worry too much, Red."

And still he kept one hand pressed against that pocket.

"Clint," she warned. It wasn't an injury. He wouldn't hide something important like that. It was definitely something that would land them in Fury's office.

She fell into step beside him and made to poke the pocket. He slapped her hand away, harder than necessary. She threw him a reproachful look and flexed stinging fingers, but didn't retaliate. No, that would come tomorrow, on the sparring mats.

"Sorry," he muttered. He paused and planted his hands on her shoulders, squeezed his eyes shut briefly and heaved a sigh. "Just...keep an open mind, okay?"

He lifted the flap of the pocket.

" _This_ is what you were wrapping up?" she demanded.

"Easy!" he admonished, as she lifted the puppy by the scruff to hold it at eye level.

It might have been tan under all the mud. It's fur was matted and stuck up at odd angles, it's ribs were clearly visible, and it wore a baleful, defeated expression that failed to garner her sympathy. It whined softly, but didn't wriggle in her grip.

"What are we supposed to do with _this_?"

" _Her_ , Nat. She's a her."

She lifted the puppy higher and pulled back its tucked tail.

"She has balls."

Clint winced.

"Okay, I thought you might feel sorry for him if he was a girl."

"Why?"

The puppy whined again, a plaintive sound, and Clint reached to take it back. Natasha stepped out of range and arched a brow.

"Well, he's an orphan. He's all alone and his mom's dead in an alley half a mile back and-"

"That's low, Barton."

"Yeah," he agreed, and managed to look at least a little ashamed of his play. "But you never feel sorry for me and I'm an orphan, so I thought girls might be different because of...you know...when you were a kid and...Shit."

"Shit," she agreed coolly, and scrutinized the puppy. It curled its paws in tighter and tucked its tail again. "Ass," she added, because what did he expect her to do now? Clint knew he'd won. She wouldn't drop the puppy back in the debris and leave it to starve, and he certainly wouldn't leave it behind. "You're an ass, Barton."

"So we're keeping him, right?"

"What are we going to feed it? It's a twelve hour flight."

"I've got some jerky in my bag, protein bars, whatever. Dogs aren't picky, Nat."

"You can't feed this dog beef jerky." It was scrawny, and it trembled in the damp, cool night air. It wheezed when it exhaled, a rattle that didn't bode well for its survival chances. "It needs milk, Clint. It's too young."

"The others were bigger. The mom wasn't..." He mimed a set of tits on his chest and she rolled her eyes. "He's old enough, he's just a runt."

The puppy whined again, then cried, then yelped, and she gave in and cradled it against her chest. Clint gave her a slow, smug grin.

"Nobody loves him, Tasha. The other puppies bullied him, and his mother pushed him away every time he tried to cuddle. Even when it was dark and raining, and even when we were bombing the hell out of this place. His family curled up together in their cardboard box and made him sleep outside in the cold, and every night he'd look up at the stars and wish-"

"Shove it up your ass, Barton," because damn it if her eyes weren't stinging, just a little, with threatening tears. "What about the _other_ puppies?" she added sardonically, and studied the rest of his pockets for signs of movement.

"They're dead, too," Clint told her, and he sounded so genuinely sad about it...

God, when had his penchant for strays rubbed off on her?

"Fine," she said, and started walking. Clint trotted along beside her, looking entirely too pleased with himself.

The puppy snuggled deeper into her arms and chewed her finger, and okay, he wasn't entirely bad. His paws were disproportionately large, so at least he'd grow big enough to be useful. His ears did that thing with one standing straight and pointed and pricked while the other folded over. She'd always been a sucker for that.

"I'll explain to Fury," Clint offered, but she shook her head.

"I'm mission leader," she said heavily. "I'll take the blame."

"Yeah, it's your first mission taking lead. Fury'll tear you a new asshole for this. It's not like he goes easy on you."

"That's why this dog better be worth it."

Clint slung an arm around her shoulders, and the gesture quelled the nervous energy she'd been suppressing all night. He smiled down at her, the soft one that made her feel warm on cold nights, the smile that always gave her that little extra confidence boost she'd never admit she needed.

"Oh, he will be. I've got an eye for bringing in assets. Haven't been wrong yet."


	20. Prompt: "Come over here and make me"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Super short one while I'm stuck at work doing actual work. :3

“Damn it,” Clint muttered. Screwdriver and arrowhead dropped to the floor with a clatter and Natasha growled. 

She usually didn’t mind Clint hanging around, but he’d spent the entire morning swearing and dropping things and groaning. 

“It _was_ peaceful in here,” she told him pointedly. The calm serenity she tried to force into the words fell flat, leaving only the biting annoyance. Ah well. She should probably give it up and go shoot something instead.

She spread her legs a bit and watched upside-down Clint stick his index finger in his mouth and suck. The coffee table was scattered with arrow shafts and arrowheads and fletching and little tools, a project that belonged in Tony’s lab and not in her impromptu yoga studio. 

“I was here first,” she added, a childish argument, but that’s how most of their arguments ended up.

“I need the light,” he countered. 

Sparring wasn’t for another hour, but she wasn’t above fighting him for the floor-to-ceiling windows and the bright morning view of Manhattan the common floor offered. She straightened up, abandoning downward facing dog without any of the recommended inhaling or exhaling or mindful thoughts about the warmth of the sun on her face. 

“The entire Tower’s wired for electricity, genius.” 

Clint stuck his tongue out. 

“Go do your stupid yoga on your own stupid floor,” he said, a sullen pout to the words. “I’ve gotta get these done.” 

_Oh._

She knew that tone. She was _distracting_ him. That was entirely different. 

She met his eyes over her shoulder, gave him a slow grin, then turned her focus back to the city view and resumed downward facing dog. The ass wiggle she threw in was decidedly not part of the pose. 

“Come over here and make me.”


	21. Prompt: "Do you…well…I mean…I could give you a massage?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> back to the tumblr prompts!

Natasha stood panting on the mats, brows drawn and an unsettling sort of anxiety in her chest.

Clint always charged straight for her when they sparred. He left her bruised and sore and sometimes actually managed to pin her. He'd crow ' _You're dead, Romanoff_!' and draw an imaginary dagger across her throat and smirk. But not today.

"Why don't you try the bag for a while," he suggested. "I'm not really into it today."

Today he only dodged and blocked. He'd retreated off the edge of the mat three times. He wouldn't look at her and he certainly didn't smile.

Clint was the only one brave (or stupid) enough to spar with her, so the punching bag hung from the ceiling in the corner was her only alternative. She shrugged and did as he recommended, driving her fists into the bag with halfhearted effort while she watched him from the corner of her eye.

He went to the bench against the far wall and retrieved a water bottle from his bag, slumped onto the bench, and leaned forward with his forearms braced on his knees.

Six missions. It had taken him six missions to realize exactly who he'd brought in, what she was capable of, how deftly she executed marks and the brutal efficiency she used to get the job done.

It had been nice to have a partner, at least for a little while.

It was selfish of her to stay in the gym - Clint would stay and pretend he still liked her because he was kind that way - so she stopped the punching bag swaying and went back to the mats to retrieve her gym bag, where she'd dumped it earlier out of impatience.

"You're leaving?" Clint called, as she swung her gym bag over her shoulder. She lied, mumbled something about mission reports, and made for the door with quick, hurried strides. "Nat, wait a minute!"

She paused with her fingers wrapped around the door handle; she'd long ago stopped fighting against the puzzling impulse to listen when Clint asked something of her.

She went back across the room and sat on the bench next to him.

"You don't trust me, after last night," she said without preamble.

"Why d'you think that?" he asked. His confusion was so genuine it made her reconsider the conclusion she'd jumped to.

"You don't want to fight."

"Of course I don't want to fight," Clint agreed, and shook his head, a hint of incredulous laughter to the words. "I spent fourteen hours lying on a roof. I almost couldn't drag my ass out of bed this morning, everything hurts."

She ducked her head and chewed her lip, and felt stupid for not putting it all together sooner. Clint had years of skill and training and he knew the correct way to man a sniper rifle. He'd been lying on the opposite rooftop, muscles drawn too tense and taut as he watched her back, because the mission had gone to hell.

"Do you…." she began, then felt stupid and clamped her mouth shut. Of course he wouldn't agree, she'd make an idiot of herself, but he was watching expectantly so she plowed on. "I could...I could give you a massage?"

"Yeah?" he asked hopefully. She blew out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding, and nodded. He beamed at her. "Best partner _ever_!"


	22. Prompt: Clint & Nat As Kids

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I went with the de-aged-by-dubious-science trope don't judge me. :D

" _Tony_?"

The shrieks dragged her back to consciousness, shrieks high-pitched and manic and utterly undignified.

"The fuck was that, Stark?"

A man, angry, nearby. Closer than the woman.

The air was thick, heavy with dust and acrid smoke, and she couldn't _see_ the others but she could hear them, groaning and shuffling. Natalia cast her eyes around and found a tight space, safe, a shiny chrome lab table overturned and wedged against a slab of fallen concrete. She pulled herself across the tile floor, arm over arm, and slid into the shadows.

Her leg stung, and when she looked back she saw the gleaming trail of blood she'd left behind. No good, it rendered her hiding place ineffective. She contemplated darting back into the open, finding something to disguise the track in the dust, but a sharp crack and a rumbling noise spared her the trouble. Another slab of concrete crashed to the floor, precisely where she'd been lying moments before, and as it shattered on the tile the debris covered her trail. Convenient.

" _Tony!_ Oh, God, Tony…."

"We're fine, Pepper!"

A second man, softer spoken than the first. She scoffed at his tone of forced calm. A wail rang through the space, another child, but it wasn't any of her comrades making _that_ pitiful sound. In fact, none of the voices were familiar at all.

She pushed herself into the very back corner of her hiding spot and listened.

"We're fine, right, J.A.R.V.I.S.?"

"I am detecting only superficial injuries, Dr. Banner."

"Okay, good. That's good. So let's...let's get the air cycling, if the ventilation systems are intact-" a metallic grind and clank and cool air wafted into the gap she'd crawled through, "-and something brighter than the auxiliary lights, and I'll track down the rest of the team."

Something had gone wrong, she could guess as much from the tremble behind the man's words and the way the light flickered through the haze of smoke and dust. There were doctors, and children, and that spelled trouble. She couldn't recall how she'd ended up in the lab, but that happened sometimes when they poked her with needles and attached their monitors.

This, this destruction and panic, had never happened before. Maybe it was her way out.

She brushed careful fingers over the mess on the floor, searching for a weapon. The older girls, they all remembered the same thing, the same pair of parents and the same little house in the countryside and an invitation to study at a ballet academy. That was wrong.

Natalia was only seven, and she remembered a house in Moscow and a mother and grandmother and only sometimes a father, and she remembered how astoundingly boring she found the ballet. She played along, just like the others in her group, endured the training and reprimands and put on a hard expression and let her eyes go dead while she stood in line. It was the doctors who took the memories and replaced them, and the doctors had only just taken an interest in her.

Natalia remembered, and she stayed alert and sharp for opportunities while the other girls fell into routine.

Her hand found a long, jagged piece of glass.

This was an opportunity, and a very good one.

The sleeve of her jacket was torn - a grey hooded jacket far too big for her small frame - so she ripped the bottom half of the sleeve the rest of the way off and wrapped the fabric around the thicker end of the glass shard.

Armed with the makeshift dagger, she lay flat on the floor and scooted forward to peer out of her hiding place again. She watched a man clear debris from the door, then a woman with red hair and a stricken, horrified expression forced her way in.

The three adults - the angry man, the doctor, and the woman - began searching the room, sifting through overturned equipment and tables, calling for Cap and Stark and Tony and Barton and Nat.

She double checked that she was concealed in shadow, and tightened her grip on the broken glass each time one of them shouted _Nat_.

The children they found were boys, not girls as she had expected. One looked sick and underfed, and his voice cracked with the onset of adolescence as he kept repeating ' _Bucky_?!' and ' _What happened, Buck_?' over and over again at the angry man. The red-haired woman fussed incessantly over the second boy, pressing a bandage against a cut on his forehead while he swatted her hand away and gazed around the lab with wide, eager eyes. The last boy only asked ' _Where's Barney_?' and when the doctor, presumably Dr. Banner, couldn't find an answer, he sat silently and had a bit of shrapnel removed from his shoulder and the wound stitched up.

There was a short stretch, a minute or two, when she was convinced they'd given up looking for her. They hadn't come close to finding her hiding place, and they wouldn't want to stay in the ruined lab any longer than necessary. They would leave, and she would escape.

Then the woman and the angry man sent their charges to sit beside Dr. Banner, and began searching again. At first, she remained confident they wouldn't find her. The man shifted pieces of debris at random, sifted through piles of rubble with his bare hands in a methodical sort of way. Tiring work, and he was on the opposite side of the room. He'd need a break long before he reached her.

The red-haired woman, however, worked smarter instead of harder. Natalia watched her stand in the middle of the lab, hands planted on her hips, and scan the mess for likely hiding places. She honed in on the dark crevice where Natalia waited almost immediately. Natalia drew back again, steeling herself to strike and hating the prospect, as the pretty woman with red hair like hers crouched and looked into the opening.

"I've got Natasha," the woman called over her shoulder, sounding relieved and happy, and her breathless tone set Natalia's nerves on edge. The woman knew her but she didn't know the woman, and that was bad.

"Is she like the others?" The angry man, still sounding angry, but there was an urgency to his words that made her clutch the jagged piece of glass a little tighter. "Because that's not Natasha."

He pushed the woman out of the way, firmly but gently, and narrowed his eyes as he studied her in the shadows.

"Natalia," he said, and fear drew taut in her chest. The sleeve of his jacket slid back and his left arm gleamed in the fluorescent lights, a _metal_ arm, and the concrete slab crumbled a little under his fingers where he grasped it for support.

A glass weapon wouldn't work on that arm. She ran her hand carefully along the side of the lab table, searching for something better.

"They took me, too" he said in Russian, and he didn't sound angry anymore, only a little sad. She watched him warily. "We made it out, Natalia, both of us. This is a safe place. You don't have to hurt anyone."

Her fingers closed around something cold and smooth, an instrument she couldn't quite identify in the dark. The metal arm reached for her.

She shifted and crouched and coiled all her muscles tight, and when his hand brushed the torn sleeve of her too-big jacket, she lunged and drove the lab instrument between two of the metal scales in the crook of his elbow.

He scowled and she sneered, and he retreated with a huff of exasperation, rocking back on his heels.

"Not Natasha," he muttered dubiously, and wrenched the lab instrument from his arm.

" _Ohmygod_ ," softly, from the woman. She sounded appropriately terrified, and Natalia discounted her as a threat. Metal Arm was the one to worry about. He could force her to submit to the doctor, and if the doctor got his needles in her, she'd never escape. "Let's try Clint-"

"She'll tear him apart," Metal Arm scoffed. " I'll drag her out, and she'll have to be restrained until we're-"

"She is a child, James," the woman hissed. "She's scared. And she's my friend. You're not _restraining_ her."

Natalia found herself surprised by the disgust and finality coloring the woman's words. She had obviously misjudged which of the two adults were in charge.

The woman stomped away to the cluster of boys in the middle of the room and Metal Arm bent down to study her again. She stuck her tongue out, then drew one finger slowly across her throat.

"Come out and try it, pipsqueak," he challenged.

She was too smart for that. She looked past Metal Arm, watched the woman choose the boy with the shrapnel injury. He chattered the entire way over.

"Is this a group home? Barney always said we'd end up in a group home. They separated us, huh? He said that would happen, too."

Natalia watched curiously as a brief flicker of anguish swept over the woman's expression.

"I'm afraid so, Clint," the woman said gently. "We've...um...had an accident. I think Natasha's too scared to come out. Can you help?"

The boy peered in at her, slightly older but scrawny, blood staining the ripped sleeve of his t-shirt and drying in tracks down his arm. He didn't seem to mind, and she recalled the stoic way he'd sat for his stitches. Maybe he was better than her. She pressed her back into the corner rather than lashing out.

"I know that look," he said solemnly, and stood straight again, so she saw only his bare feet. "She thinks you're gonna smack her. That's why she won't come out. You won't, right? She's just little, she didn't do this-"

"No, sweetie. We're not going to...no. I promise, but I need you to help me get her out of there, it isn't safe."

"Sure, yeah," the boy agreed, "but you need to stand way over there." He waited until the woman crossed the room and Metal Arm stalked away, then dropped to his knees and thrust a hand into her hiding spot, palm open. "Hi," he said, and wiggled his fingers. "I'm Clint. You can come out if you want, the grown-ups won't smack you around."

Her first instinct was not to believe him, but he was so earnest she found herself wanting to.

"Beat the shit out of you?" he tried, when she didn't reply. "Hit you? That's why you're hiding, right?"

She chewed her lip and shrugged one shoulder. Being struck was nothing new - she'd learned how to take a hit and keep her mouth shut about it - but it felt easier to let the boy think that was why she was hiding than to explain about the doctors and their needles and the tests.

Clint lay flat on his stomach and propped his chin on folded arms.

"You've got a good spot, but it could be better. You're cornered in there. You're always supposed to hide with a back exit, so they can't pin you down and grab you."

She wrinkled her nose and shook her head, but couldn't quite find her voice to ask what sort of backwards training he'd received. If she hid well enough in the first place, nobody would find her. And why would she ever need a second way out of her hiding place, when she could fight her way out? A second entrance only meant someone could sneak up on her.

"Everyone here's real nice, I think. Maybe...maybe you want to watch me first? That's what Barney does sometimes. He goes out first and checks it's safe, and he lets me hide until I feel better. Yeah, so I'll be Barney and you can be me for a while, and when you decide to stop being afraid you can come out."

She bristled, mostly because Clint's assessment was true, but she lifted her chin and searched quickly for the English she wanted, focused and tried to make her accent disappear the way they showed her in training.

"I am not afraid," she told him, and while she tried for smug and haughty, there was still a slight betraying waver to the words, and her accent bled through, and she wished she'd kept her mouth shut. Tears pricked her eyes.

Clint frowned for a moment, brow furrowed, then brightened and gave her another grin.

" _Cautious_. That's what Barney calls it. Dad says we're chickenshit but Barney says we're cautious. It's different from scared, it means you're smart. You're that."

Cautious and smart were acceptable traits, and she found herself warming to the boy with the easy smiles and bright grey eyes. She sucked a deep breath through her nose - absolutely _not_ a sniffle - and forced the tears away.

" _Da_ ," she agreed, and nodded once.

"Okay," he said, and nodded back. He scrambled up on his hands and knees. "So I'll go over there and talk to the other kids, and you can watch the grown-ups not hit me, and then you can come out. Deal?"

He shoved his hand at her again, and she gave in and brushed her fingers against his.

A pleasant warmth blossomed in her chest, and a not-so-pleasant shock of electricity started in the tips of her fingers and rippled up her arm.

Clint's eyes went wide and he jerked his hand back, flicked his gaze from her to his fingers and back again.

"It wasn't me," she said carefully, and examined her own fingers.

"Me either," he said. He lay flat on his stomach again, slid his head and shoulders into her hiding spot, reached for her. When he spoke, it was in a hushed whisper. "You can come out now. I think that meant we're supposed to be friends. I won't let anything bad happen."

And without quite knowing why, she took his hand and let him pull her from the shadows.


	23. Prompt: Avengers Minus Natasha

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I finally did one of the prompts backlogged in my inbox! It came out a little tropey and cliche I think but I had fun??
> 
> I was asked for the following: "all other avengers are trapped but they didn't take Natasha in (she got away, they weren't aware that she was important enough to go out after) and clint can't stop laughing when he realises this and the others are like 'hi hello clint yes this is a life or death situation' and then boom bamf Natasha comes in yadda yadda they are saved"

“Where’s Nat?” Clint slurs immediately upon opening his eyes. It’s Stark instead of Natasha leaning over him. Stark’s lap his head is pillowed on, denim rough against the nape of his neck instead of smooth leather. Stark, cheeks pale and eyes shadowed with worry, instead of Natasha’s customary smirk and smartass comments. 

He pushes himself up, or tries to, but Sam leans into his field of vision and puts a hand on his shoulder, guiding him slowly up to sit. 

“Easy, man,” he says. At least, that’s what Clint thinks he says, because he can’t hear and his brain doesn’t grind into action quickly enough to lip read. Tony presses one of his hearing aides into his hand. 

“Still working on the other one,” Tony says apologetically, once Clint’s got it turned on and fitted into place. The other half of the pair is in three pieces on the floor, surrounded by a set of the tiniest screwdrivers he’s ever seen. 

“Where’s Natasha?” he asks again. Sam sighs and looks to Tony, who grimaces and looks a little sick. Panic kindles in his chest, beings to build to a crescendo. They always take Natasha first, interrogate her first, give her the first round of experimental drugs, because every villain seems to know the Black Widow’s history and thinks she’ll be easy to break.  

“She jumped,” Steve says hoarsely. He’s sitting in the corner of the room beside Thor, both fitted with massive sets of shackles buzzing with blue electricity, all slumped shoulders and an air of utter defeat. 

Bits and flashes of the fight come back to him, mechanical monsters and genetically enhanced giant insects, distractions to overwhelm them while these guys, whoever _these guys_ are, picked them off one by one. The manacles sap Steve and Thor of their strength, he recalls seeing them go down. 

Last he saw of Natasha, she was throwing herself at the body-armor-clad bad guys attached to Steve. Then he’d been bashed over the head. 

“Jumped?” he repeats blankly.

“There were two cars,” Steve continues, speaking in monotone now, eyes on the floor. “You guys were in the first one, Thor and I were in the second with Natasha. She slipped her handcuffs and kicked the door open and just…jumped.” 

“Brooklyn Bridge,” Tony adds. “There was traffic…eighteen-wheelers…. They didn’t even bother going back for her.” 

“She isn’t here,” Clint says, more to himself than the rest of the team. Relief sweeps through him, leaving him lightheaded, more lightheaded than he already felt anyway, and he can’t stop the wild little chuckle that slips out because these guys, whoever they are, are completely fucked.  

“Yeah,” Sam agrees, and gives him a pained smile, squeezes his shoulder in a bracing sort of way. “She isn’t here. She won’t be here for this.” 

“Of course she’ll be here,” Clint scoffs, before he reasons the deeper meaning behind Sam’s words. 

They think she’s dead, which offends him a bit, but also makes him giggle again. He’s seen Natasha pull way dumber stunts than jumping out of a car into traffic. 

“She’ll be here,” he repeats firmly, and slides back to lean against the wall of their cell. The others give him varying degrees of pitying expressions, but leave him to rest. 

Tony tinkers disconsolately with the second hearing aid for a while. It doesn’t quite work when he gives it back - it won’t amplify sound to the same level as the other one - but Clint mumbles his thank-you anyway and settles in to wait. 

Thor repeatedly tests the shackles around his wrists. Sam paces the perimeter of the room, pushing against the cinderblocks in search of weaknesses that aren’t there. Tony and Steve burn an hour trying to pick the lock on the steel door with the tiny screwdrivers Tony somehow smuggled in. 

“Barton?” Steve says at last, and holds out one of the little tools. 

“You’re wasting your time, Cap,” he replies easily. He tips his head back against the wall and closes his eyes. Steve doesn’t push.

He’s good at locks, he could probably break them out if he applied himself, but it’s all principal now. They doubted Natasha and he wants them proved wrong. 

It’s an hour, maybe two, later and they’ve all settled into inactivity. Steve perks up beside him, head canted to one side and brows drawn together. Clint can’t hear it yet, but he can guess. He arches a brow at Steve in silent question. 

“Machine guns,” Steve tells him, sounding puzzled and uneasy. That gets Tony on his feet, and Sam’s not far behind. 

Thor, who has been oddly silent, jolts to attention, then catches Clint’s eye and gives him a slow smile. 

The gunfire draws closer, echoing through the compound until even Clint’s busted hearing aids pick it up. There’s something familiar in the cadence and pattern of the shots, something Natasha. 

“Sucks to be them,” Clint mutters. Thor nods his agreement and smiles again, a bright, eager expression. 

Then the fight is right outside in the hallway, reverberating gunfire and strangled shouts. The others, save he and Thor, pace the cell in fighting stances. Steve starts straining against his manacles again. 

The corridor beyond their cell goes quiet for one beat, two…. 

The door crumples inward and swings back on one broken hinge, and there’s Natasha, standing silhouetted in the doorway. Yeah, she’s bleeding, a little beat up, but she’s got Sam’s wings securely on her back, and his bow and quiver over one shoulder, Steve’s shield strapped to her forearm, one of Tony’s repulsor gloves on the other hand, and even…. 

He shouldn’t be surprised, he feels terrible for being surprised, but he doesn’t let it show because he’ll never hear the end of it. The shock wears off almost immediately, replaced by a glowing sense of pride and savage satisfaction at the looks on the others’ faces. 

“Took ya long enough,” Clint drawls, and pushes himself up to go meet her. Steve, Tony, and Sam are still gaping. 

“Indeed!” Thor gives her the widest grin and stands as well. “It is unkind to ‘leave us to stew’.”  

“Let’s go, boys,” she says with a smirk, and swings Mjolnir at Thor’s shackles. 


	24. Prompt: Grinding

“Now hook your leg and lean back,” Natasha ordered, watching critically as Clint made a halfhearted effort to execute the move she’d just demonstrated. He slid down the pole and landed hard on his ass. Natasha blew out a sigh. 

“You’re too stiff,” Pepper told him with a frown. “He’s too stiff.” 

Natasha hummed her agreement. 

“Languid, Barton,” Hill called from across the room, half glancing up from her tablet. “Everything should blend together into one motion.”

“Look, can we not do this right now?” Clint asked, directing the plea to Natasha. “Not that I don’t appreciate the help,” he added quickly, “but Pepper and Maria…I don’t wanna know. I don’t wanna think about it.”

“It’s exercise, Clint,” Pepper snapped. Hill snorted. 

“Five minutes,” Natasha relented, and gave Clint a hand up. “We take a class.”

They went to the kitchen for water, sitting side-by-side on the counter to cool down. 

“You take stripper classes?” 

“It’s an exercise class. Nobody takes their clothes off.”   

“Too bad,” Clint muttered bitterly, “‘cause somebody’s gonna have to show me how to do that part, too.”

It was his own fault, but Natasha chose to at least feign sympathy, even though she didn’t really feel any. 

“How long have you known about this op?” 

“Couple weeks,” Clint admitted, and ducked his head. “I kept hoping Fury would reassign it. Or cancel it. I think it’s payback for parking his car on the roof.”  

“That was a good one,” Natasha agreed. “Thanks for leaving me out of it.”

Clint scowled and drained his water bottle. 

“Can we try something besides the poles? Somewhere that isn’t the common room?” 

She almost told him no, that Pepper and Maria were useful critics, noticing flaws she couldn’t while she showed Clint how to move, but then…. 

“Why is there exotic dancing paraphernalia in my living room?” Tony had discovered the three shiny new poles. “Not that I’m opposed…. Pep, is this an early birthday present?”

“Barton has an undercover op.”

“As a male dancer?” Tony asked gleefully. “Okay, I volunteer as tribute. Let’s see what he’s got.” 

“Tony, no,” sternly from Pepper, ever the voice of reason. 

“Upstairs,” Natasha said, because she didn’t have the strength to deal with Tony in addition to Clint. They slipped out of the kitchen and into the stairwell, choosing her floor over Clint’s; Tony wouldn’t dare trespass, not even for blackmail material. 

“What else was in the dossier?”

“Lap dances?” Clint said, the words lilting into a question. “And the club, it’s a…um…it’s a place for men?” 

“ _Clint_!” she admonished. He hadn’t mentioned that, and it made her wonder what else he was withholding. She’d been using the wrong sets of critical eyes. “Okay, maybe we should get Steve-”

“No!” he all but yelped. “I mean, probably. But not right now. At least show me what I’m supposed to do first.”

“Well, you’re going to have to take it seriously. You won’t be dancing for a bunch of bachelorette parties. The drunk girls would’ve been way easier to entertain.”

“Yeah, Magic Mike stuff, prance around in a fireman hat and suspenders, whatever. This isn’t that. I’m supposed to really make it believable. I have to get the mark to take me to one of the back rooms.” 

A tall order, and one he probably couldn’t fill, even with a crash course in sensual lap dances. But you just didn’t give up on your partner, even when it seemed hopeless, so Natasha dragged him over to her couch and made him sit, kicked the coffee table out of the way, and shucked off her workout clothes. 

“This isn’t going anywhere,” she warned, pulling her hair tie loose and shaking out her hair. “Pay attention to what I do and how I do it, not your dick. Got it?” 

“Yup,” Clint replied. “No sex because you’re mad I left this til the last minute.” 

“Exactly,” she said, and straddled his hips. It was strange to move against him without any of the usual kissing or touching, but as Clint actually listened and kept his hands to himself and studied how she moved, it seemed selfish to give in to her own impulses. It wasn’t until she turned her back on him, to grind her ass against his thighs, that she felt his erection and began to regret putting a ban on any extracurriculars. 

“Sorry,” Clint said quickly when she paused. She glanced back and watched him adjust himself through his basketball shorts. “But you did the hair thing.” 

“What hair thing?” she asked, puzzled. She hadn’t done anything special, or hadn’t meant to. 

“Y’know, the hair thing. You arch your back and run your hands up the back of your neck and sort of flip your hair. It’s hot.”  

“Your turn,” she said, rather than admit that perhaps she’d been a little too into it, too busy imagining the things she’d said they couldn’t do. 

They switched positions and Clint stood shuffling awkwardly before her, clearly unsure how to start. 

“You’ll be in your underwear,” she offered. Clint gave the basketball shorts an unceremonious tug and kicked them across the room. Natasha rolled her eyes. “The shirt, too. Slowly.” 

“You want a whip or something?” he muttered. “Stop giving me orders, I know how to do it.” 

“Fine, do it,” she retorted. 

He did a tepid little strip tease, then sat on her lap and squished her into the sofa. 

“Clint.” 

“This is bullshit.” 

A new idea struck her. 

“Turn around,” she told him. He growled but complied, kneeling on the sofa and leaning over her. “Now sit.” He folded his legs and sat on her thighs. “Kiss me.” 

“Thought this wasn’t going anywhere.” 

“I just changed the rules.” 

He kissed her and ran his hands through her hair and bit her lip, and after a minute or two she felt him relax, felt the self-conscious way he’d been holding himself fade. Just like she had, he got too caught up to think about exactly how he was moving, and he wasn’t doing half bad, his hips rolling against her and his knees squeezing her thighs. 

She had only meant to prank Clint with the fake mission, get him back for putting honey in her shampoo bottle, but the role reversal was an unexpected bonus, and unexpectedly hot. Maybe she’d save the big reveal until later, _after_ he’d taken her to the bedroom.


	25. Prompt: Ew Blood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Haven't done one of these in a while! This time the prompt was hurt/comfort and: "By the time they find Natasha its hard to spot an inch of undamaged skin. She tries for a smirk but there is blood in her teeth, and when they step forward to help she flinches back, grimacing apologetically even as she starts to shake..."

"We've got Banner," Clint says, the words echoing hollow over the comms. He should feel relieved and grateful - Bruce is a teammate, and he's in one piece - but all he can think is how he'd rather be saying _We've got Nat_.

"Is he-"

"Unconscious," Clint breaks in, speaking over Tony. "Sedated or something."

He watches Sam remove the monitors and IV drip, watches Thor lift Bruce from the metal exam table. If someone in this compound successfully discovered a way to keep Banner's Other Guy at bay, what would they have done to Natasha?

She isn't special, in the traditional sense. She isn't a god, she doesn't have serum enhancements, no arc reactor, no gamma radiation. Why would they want her?

"Has anyone cleared Level 6?" Steve asks as they move into the hallway, and there's something in his tone that sets Clint's nerves on edge, makes him pause just short of following Sam and Thor to the exit.

Everyone sounds off, stating their position. Steve blows out a long, slow breath.

"I've got bodies. It looks like Natasha."

The statement lilts into a question at the end and he knows what Steve really means to say - _It looks like Natalia_ \- only Steve's never seen that side of her and doesn't have the words.

"Hold position," Clint barks, and slams into the stairwell, taking the stairs two at a time. There's an odd ringing in his ears that has nothing to do with his aids and everything to do with the way he can't quite breathe at the grim silence from Steve's end.

He finds the first of the bodies Steve mentioned on the landing for Level 6, a man in a lab coat with a length of rebar driven through his eye socket. Natalia's work, alright, either pissed off or terrified. Natasha's kills aren't usually so messy.

Steve opens the door for him, pointing down the hallway beyond with two fingers, a sharp military gesture, then signaling for Clint to be quiet. He looks past Steve to the second body and knows immediately that any sound Steve heard is Natasha and not more enemies.

He makes himself study the corpses, because he has to get a read on her somehow. The closest one is slumped against the wall, one arm raised, the hand pinned above its head with a knife driven through the palm. Routine, if not for the way she took the time to skin the man's arm, wrist to elbow, flesh hanging in long strips toward the floor, no doubt done while he was still alive.

Steve's wearing a convincing poker face, and who knows, maybe he saw worse in the war. Maybe his presence will help rather than hinder.

"No weapons," Clint warns, a soft exhale of breath in the space that suddenly feels dangerously quiet. He rolls his shoulders but can't quite shake the feeling of being watched, the predator versus prey dynamic making him feel vulnerable in a way only Natasha could ever inspire.

He moves down the hall, Steve tight on his heels. The next kill is a little less brutal, a guard with the barrel of his sidearm still jammed in his mouth, brains and blood splattering the wall beside him. Two more lab-coated scientists, empty syringes with huge needles sticking out of their chests.

Then, mercifully, a guard with a simple gunshot wound to the forehead. A guard with a thin red line standing out across his throat, evidence of the garrote Natasha's so fond of. He looks back and studies the trail of bodies again, and maybe Steve doesn't see it, but to him the progression tells a story that makes his heart hammer a little less fiercely.

Steve waves his hand again, indicating the last room on the left; the door stands half open, the room beyond dark.

If he thinks about it, he'll lose his nerve.

"Tasha?" he calls, and flips the light.

There's a flurry of movement from the far side of the room, a crash as a metal surgical tray full of brutal-looking instruments falls to the floor. He freezes, and senses Steve do the same behind him.

One beat, two, three. He isn't dead, and he looses a relieved huff of breath.

"Mission's done," Steve says, the words tight and clipped. "We've got Natasha."

But the mission isn't finished at all, at least not for him. Not by a long shot.

He passes Steve his bow and quiver and comm unit, telegraphing each motion with slow, patient gestures. Natasha crouches behind a lab table and scrutinizes them.

"We're okay," he murmurs, more to settle his own nerves, because holy shit Natasha's good, and if she senses any weakness at all she'll tear him apart. "You're okay."

He chances the smallest step forward; Natasha lifts her chin and narrows her eyes, and it would almost be easier if she were afraid of him. He moves closer like that, a painstaking pace and whispered reassurances. He drops down to mirror her position, leaving some three feet of space between them as a buffer, studying each shift and movement she makes and half expecting her to lunge for him.

She does lean forward, a quick gesture that makes his heart leap into his throat, then-

"Took you long enough," she says coolly.

He finds himself sitting on the floor instead of crouching, his breath coming in ragged bursts as the tension seeps away all at once.

"Asshole," he retorts emphatically.

She smirks then, but any black humor is immediately lost in a wince of pain and the shine of blood in her teeth. It's not just her mouth; she's absolutely covered in blood, hair matted in sticky clumps near a head injury, jeans stained with large black patches. Hell, he could probably wring it out of her shirt if he tried.

He can't quite tell how much of the blood is hers, however. He can make out a number of bruises, some dark purple and some fading already to a sickly yellow-green, she's got a split lip and the cut to her head, superficial knife wounds. No, if he had to hazard a guess, most of the blood belongs to the facility's staff.

"Let's get outta here," he says. He pushes himself up and reaches for her without thinking, takes her hand to pull her up.

She makes a squeaky, hitched noise, not quite a scream, wrenches her hand away and kicks him in the shin, and his chest aches for how terribly he's misjudged the situation.

"S-sorry," she whispers, shaking her head faintly and watching him with wide eyes, her back pressed against the wall, shaking and trembling. Her eyes are _too_ wide, pupils too dilated; he didn't notice before, focused instead on the blood. There's a bruise and a dark smear of red in the crook of her elbow, and he wishes she'd saved him one of the scientist.

"S'alright," he says, shrugging, tone light. She bites her lip and looks away. "You know what they gave you?"

She shakes her head again.

"I can't find Bruce," she says to the floor, sounding a little unsure. "He was afraid."

"He's fine," Clint lies, "they weren't bothering him. You drew them away on purpose, right?"

It's a shot in the dark, but she looks up again and nods once. She relaxes a little, pulls away from the wall, meets his eyes with a searching expression, brows drawn.

"Clint," she says, not a question, but he knows she's grasping for something familiar so he gives her a smirk and draws up a cavalier attitude he doesn't really feel.

"Don't worry, Red. I won't tell anybody you needed extraction."

She narrows her eyes and curls her lips into a sneer at the teasing, but doesn't fire back. She walks with shaky steps to meet him, brushes past him in a barely-composed, too-casual way. He rests his hand against her back out of habit, one of a hundred throwaway intimate gestures they use around each other.

"Don't," she says sharply, and the facade breaks. She dodges away and gives him that apologetic expression again, clenching her hands into fists to hide the trembling in her fingers. "I was back there, and I know it wasn't real but it still feels like it, so...don't."

"You tell me when it's okay," he says. She exhales and some of the tension seeps from her posture.

It's familiar territory - old, but familiar - and his feelings aren't hurt. Maybe it's the drugs or maybe it's the head injury, or a combination of both. It means a bit more work on his part, drawing her out and waiting for the flashes of memory to wane, but he'll take paranoid covered-in-blood Natasha over his initial dread and fear of how the situation could have played out any day. This, whatever this is, they can work through it.

He moves into the hallway and lets Natasha trail behind at a distance. Steve's cleared the space of bodies, and Clint feels a rush of gratitude for the foresight. The stairwell's clear, too.

He throws little glances over his shoulder, studies the way she moves in fleeting looks. She seems steady enough to get herself to the Quinjet, a little too wary and hesitant maybe, but he can't fault her for it.

A new thought hits him. His original plan was to keep quiet and let Natasha come to him, but she might not want everyone seeing her like this, and she'll feel even worse if she ends up lashing out at someone other than him.

She's grown close with the other Avengers, but he's never bothered to ask exactly how comfortable she feels, or how much of herself she's given to the others. She's less guarded with Steve, he's noticed that much, and Tony, oddly enough.

"The team's waiting on the Quinjet," Clint tells her, pausing on the first floor landing. Natasha stops too, three stairs above him. He can see Steve through the little glass window in the door, waiting in the hall beyond. "Do we need to find our own ride back?"

"No," she says, a little hesitant. Then, stronger, "No. It's fine."

He takes her at her word, when probably none of the others would.

Steve doesn't question why Natasha's walking a solid ten feet behind him. They move through the facility and across the grounds, into the darkness of a moonless night. The Quinjet's parked on a ridge half a mile away, through sparse woods and across a shallow slow-moving creek.

He senses Natasha moving closer as they walk, closing in on him as the trees push together. She takes his hand.

"Hi," she breathes, and his next few steps are as unsteady as hers as relief sweeps through him. He turns to catch her eye - her fingers twitch in his grasp and begin to slide away - but he tightens his grip and pulls her in closer.

"Hi, Tasha."

She smiles, just a small one, a tremulous expression that wavers and breaks too quickly, but it's real and it's enough. Mission accomplished.


	26. Prompt: One character adjusting the other’s jewelry/neck tie/etc.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A short one, but I wrote something!

“Taser discs,” Clint announced, and dropped a small plastic box into her suitcase. “You got the extra battery packs for the Bites?”

Natasha hummed her assent, shoving aside a pair of skinny jeans to make room for the discs. Guns were next, just the small ones, concealed in a rolled-up sweater.

“I think I’ve got your spare magazines,” she told him. Clint paused, studied the mess on the bed: suitcases, two mission files, sniper rifles, ammo, pizza box. He reached into his own suitcase, unearthed two clips and plucked another from the jumble on the bed.

“Switch,” he said, and they tossed the magazines across with practiced efficiency. “You want any of these?”

She studied the selection of knives laid out beside his suitcase, chose the meanest one, a foot long blade with a serrated edge. Clint gave her a little grin, rolled his eyes at the predictability.

If she was taking a knife, she’d need poison for the blade.

She crossed to the dresser (scarred, the finish peeling off, ‘you don’t get to redecorate my apartment, Nat’) and tugged open the middle drawer. Her fingers found the leather case, housing a row of tiny crystal vials, hidden beneath an untidy pile of rarely-worn lingerie.

“Wish you wouldn’t put that shit on my good knives,” Clint grumbled from behind. She looked up to meet his eyes in the mirror, a retort on the tip of her tongue, but he wasn’t scowling.

He gave her a soft smile and looped a chain around her neck instead, hooked the clasp and pulled her hair through. His fingers brushed her skin, made her shiver.

“What’s this for?” she asked. She ran a finger over the silver arrow at her throat, the metal cool and smooth.

“I need you to be safe,” he replied. He leaned in and dropped a kiss against her shoulder, another into the curve of her neck.

She spun in his arms, back pressed into the edge of the dresser.

“Be safe?” she repeated, one eyebrow arched. They didn’t say things like that before missions, no be safes or be carefuls or I’ll miss you. Clint’s expression turned solemn. “What’s going on?”

“Dunno,” he said slowly. “I’ve just got a feeling.”

“What kind of feeling?”

He let her go, paced back to the bed and frowned down at the contents of the two mission files.

“Things always go to shit when Fury splits us up like this.”

He had a point, and now she had a feeling too, a bad one, hues of brightest blue and hand-to-hand in the belly of the helicarrier.

She held the arrow between her fingers, felt it grow warm, and already it felt like a talisman, a charm.


	27. Prompt: Hot Teacher Clint

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The best prompt that will at some point probably be a fic: "HOT NEW TEACHER CLINT BARTON. And yknow, some Clintasha too. BUT HOT TEACHER CLINT BARTON IS IMPORTANT. Tattoos would he gr8 too. Maybe a suit."
> 
> I mean I went with PROFESSOR Clint Barton so.

"The Aristocracy in 18th century London. You got this, Barton."

The door of the lecture hall opened. He clamped his mouth shut and looked up from his notes to see the first student - his honest to God _first ever student_ \- enter the room. She paused at the top of the stairs, brows drawing together, black leather bag clutched tightly in one hand.

"History 312?" he called, and tried to inject a little enthusiasm into his tone, to cover the nervous butterflies clenching his chest. The woman's eyesbrows arched up at that, a wry little grin pulling her mouth up at one corner. "Come in. Sit anywhere. I won't do attendance or assigned seats or whatever."

She hesitated for a moment that seemed to stretch on indefinitely, long enough that he began to feel anxious that she was in the wrong place, this wasn't his first student at all, maybe he wouldn't have _any_ students–.

She walked down the stairs and chose a seat right on the front row, placing her bag carefully on the seat beside her.

"Professor Barton," Clint said, stepping forward and sticking out a hand to introduce himself. Were you supposed to introduce yourself? She probably didn't give a shit. Was he being creepy? Super creepy, probably. He jerked his hand back, realizing too late that she'd been about to accept the gesture.

"Natasha," she said with a slow grin, and tucked her hand back into her lap.

"Sorry," he said quickly. _Blowing it, Barton!_ "It's uh…it's my first class. You're early."

He went back to his notes, heat stinging his cheeks. He didn't look at Natasha again, didn't look up at all until the door opened once more and a tall guy stumbled in, looking a little lost. He looked to Clint and then at Natasha, sitting in the front row; she gave the kid a jaunty little wave and smile, and he took a seat in the back row.

_Two_ students! The new kid even pulled a textbook from his backpack.

The lecture hall filled up, and Clint shuffled his notes on the podium. Were the tattoos peeking out of the rolled-up sleeves of his button-down too much? Probably so. He didn't want them to think he'd be an easy credit. He shrugged on his sportcoat and did up one button.

The clock at the back of the lecture hall read 9am, and he launched into his introduction. The kids actually paid attention, took notes, a couple even looked for a moment as if they'd interrupt, maybe to argue a point or ask for clarification, but they chickened out in the end.

No problem. He'd made sure to leave a transition in his notes, a good point to pause and regroup.

"Any questions?" he asked. Crickets. He felt his posture slump and tried to reign in the disappointment.

Natasha's hand shot up. Maybe she had a question and maybe she was just taking pity on him, but he didn't much care at this point. Relief swept through him and he gestured for her to go ahead.

"Could you tell me what day it is?" she asked.

Odd, but…

"Tuesday," he said. A hushed ripple of laughter swept across the room. Natasha smiled again, stood and stepped forward, stuck out her hand.

"Professor Romanoff. It's Wednesday and you're in my lecture hall."


	28. Prompt: Tipsy Kiss

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was in a mood when I wrote this so I apologize in advance. :3

Natasha shivers, the cold biting at her exposed shoulders, wind tossing her hair into her face. Clint's suit jacket rests beside her on the hood of the car, and although she runs her fingers over the fabric, she doesn't move to put it on. It's an insignificant way to atone for her failure, but warmth seem profane.

Phil's cold - he has to be cold, there's no way the sleek metal coffin would be anything but.

"The 0-8-4 in Oregon," Clint mumbles, and takes a deep drag from his cigarette. The faint glow from the embers throws the planes of his face into shadow. His eyes look overbright.

She has a quick flash of Clint and Coulson, sweeping the building, poking through dusty vaults while she and May stand at either end of the corridor. She remembers the easy camaraderie, the jokes and teasing because the 0-8-4 turned out to be a weird fertility statue and they're all approximately as mature as a group of kindergartners.

She turns away and drains the rest of her too-warm beer, even though the taste makes her stomach churn. It's the fancy craft beer Coulson likes - _liked_ \- and Clint claims the two six-packs in the trunk of the car were a coincidence.

"Odessa," she says, because she can't seem to pull up any of the bittersweet memories Clint keeps throwing out, only blood and fear and white-hot hurt.

"Not thinkin' about Odessa tonight," Clint rumbles. "Go again."

She can't find anything else, just the ghost of Phil's hand closing around her forearm, and the calm reassurances he'd spoken.

She slams the empty bottle back into its slot in the cardboard sleeve. Clint startles at the noise, and she should feel bad, but she only has the urge to smash the empties on the asphalt. She falls back, sprawls on the hood of the car and stares up at the scatter of stars. Clint flicks the last half of his cigarette away.

"Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S." he says.

She's suddenly tired of the conversation. She wants to go home but neither of them can drive and they can't call Coulson. They're aimless, loitering drunk in a graveyard, because the one who held them together is gone.

"What about it?" she asks, playing along. She has nothing better to do.

Clint takes her hand and pulls her back up to sit; the sudden shift leaves her lightheaded. He squeezes her fingers and cups her cheek with his free hand, then he's kissing her, eyes closed, tongue, smoke on his breath. Her stomach flips again and some instinct spurs her into motion, and she returns the effort just enough to appease him.

He pulls away, lights another cigarette.

"Coulson told me to stop wasting time," he mumbles, the words oddly strangled.

She looks past him, through him, to the rows of flower arrangements on stands and the gap where the headstone will be.

The traitorous thought claws its way into the back of her mind: Phil's death wasn't worth that kiss.


	29. Prompt: Humiliation

"Hey, Barton!" They turn at the shout, find one of the agents from Alpha Team striding down the corridor behind them. "Fury's looking for you. Gym on the fourth floor."

Natasha has a little stab of disappointment at the interruption, a silly, childish thing to feel. Pizza can be reheated, or eaten cold. Clint isn't picky, he won't mind.

"Romanoff, too," the agent adds without meeting her eyes. None of them really look at her when they talk. Clint frowns, as he always does when his colleagues pretend she isn't standing right beside him.

"He say what it's about?"

The agent shrugs, mutters "Sorry, man," and continues down the corridor.

"Let's go get yelled at," Clint says, too brightly in her opinion. He takes her hand and drags her along after him.

"We haven't done anything," she protests. The words lilt into a question, because Fury chooses strange things to ride them about. "I kept the body count at five in Switzerland."

"Maybe it's a speech about how we should try to exceed our goals, 'stead of just being satisfied with meeting them on a technicality."

Clint smirks, and she sticks her tongue out.

"Number six still had a pulse when we left," she reminds him, and he barks a laugh.

The gym on the fourth floor is massive, and Natasha's never liked it, too many whispers and too much staring. She prefers the tiny gym on level seven, or the shooting range, or that room on the R&D floor where she and Clint are allowed to blow things up and call it weapons testing.

Something feels off as they advance down the hallway, some unnameable instinct slowing her steps enough that Clint glances back to find her as he pulls open the gym door.

It's dark inside, for a moment, then the lights go up and a collective shout of "Surprise!" echoes down the corridor.

Natasha's pulse jumps in that uncomfortable anxious way, when she would ordinarily strike first and ask questions later but can't because she's with S.H.I.E.L.D now. Clint just says "Awesome!" and pushes his way into the gym without her. Curious now, she follows.

The exercise equipment has all been moved out. Someone's strung hundreds of lights around the walls, strobe lights and mirror balls and the twinkly white ones from the company Christmas party Clint dragged her to six months ago. There's a DJ booth and a long table of catered food and a cake and beer kegs and...oh.

Her stomach drops, this time not out of nerves. The sensation pairs with a heavy weight of disappointment and a twinge of embarrassment and that stinging feeling in her throat that means she's about to cry.

It's not the fact that the party was clearly put together in secret, or that she was only invited because she happened to be standing right beside Clint at the moment. She doesn't give a single shit about any of the three hundred assorted S.H.I.E.L.D agents gathered in the gym, and nothing they could conceivably do would ever hurt her feelings.

No, it's the pizza and cupcakes she hid in Clint's quarters half an hour ago, the gift wrapped in shiny purple paper sitting on his coffee table.

Clint likes people and belonging and talking and laughing and _of course_ he would rather be at this kind of party, instead of cooped up in his quarters all night, and she hadn't even thought of that because she doesn't have a frame of reference for birthdays because she's Red Room, the Black Widow, Barton's stray, the girl people skirt around in corridors and she'll _never_ get it right-

"You're good," Clint says appreciatively, coming over to nudge her shoulder. "Like, I know your job is to keep secrets and shit, but...you're good."

It would ruin the mood to admit that she had no idea the party existed until two minutes ago; Clint thinks she was involved, and he always gets pissy when the other agents exclude her from things, although she hasn't been able to work out why it matters so much to him.

"Go enjoy your party," she says, playing smug. He buys it, too distracted to notice her smile is a little too forced. He wrangles three sniper buddies and they disappear across the room, in the direction of the catering spread.

And this - this feeling of absolute mortification - is what happens when sentimentality gets in the way of logic. Lesson learned. Now she has to fix it.

It won't be much different from any other mission. She's done it a thousand times: infiltrate a party, snatch a key off the unsuspecting host, disappear upstairs to retrieve the money or the launch codes or whatever insignificant objective the man keeps locked in a safe. She's already stolen Clint's identification badge once today to gain access to his quarters and set up her own surprise. It shouldn't be difficult to do again.

She makes a circuit of the gym, keeps her ears open. It was Clint's Special Ops friends who set up the party, she learns, the snipers and combat tacticians he hangs around with most, when he's not with her. Of course they know what he likes.

She's good at belonging without _actually_ belonging. She chats with Maria and Sharon and Coulson and makes sure Clint sees her interacting; if he gets hyper-vigilant worrying about her having fun, she'll never sneak his identification. She lets him goad her into doing a keg stand. She cheers when he wipes the floor with his friends in a dart throwing competition, and here it is, the opportunity she's been looking for.

"That's not even a challenge," she scoffs to the woman standing beside her, a girl from accounting she knows has her eye on Clint. "Barton could beat them all blindfolded."

And, as expected:

"Blindfold!" the brunette shouts, bouncing on her toes and thrusting her hands in the air. Other agents echo the idea (S.H.I.E.L.D agents are easily amused, she's discovered, no better than cats with a laser pointer) until a bandanna gets thrust into Clint's hands.

"Good luck," she tells him, stepping forward to tie the bandanna around his eyes.

"It's called _skill_ , Red," he quips back.

An agent slaps three darts into his open palm, another one takes him by the shoulders and forces him to make three quick turns on the spot. Natasha nudges past him and quickly unclips the badge from the belt loop of his jeans.

She doesn't leave, not immediately. She takes her place in the half-circle of agents gathered to watch the dart game, cheers loudly enough for Clint to distinguish her voice from the others as he lands the first bullseye.

Everyone's distracted after that and nobody notices when she sneaks into the corridor and up the stairwell.

That feeling comes back, shame burning hot in her chest. It makes her heart slam frantic against her ribs, a sense of urgency she's never felt on a mission before, a voice hissing in her ear to cover her tracks before she's found out and has to face Clint with an explanation. The thought makes her stomach twist.

The hallway she ducks down on the residential floor is empty, and at least _something's_ going right tonight. She stands in front of his door, swipes his badge. The lock clicks.

She doesn't have a plan, besides stashing everything in her own room and dealing with it later.

"Natasha."

 _Shit_.

She turns and smoothly conceals his badge in her pocket, opens her mouth but can't find any words. The door handle grows slick beneath her palm as Clint strides down the hallway.

"What are you doing, Natasha?"

The words are weighted, suspicious. She shakes her head, shrugs a little, can't find an excuse. She certainly doesn't want to tell him the truth.

"Let's go back to the party," she tries. Clint scowls.

"You're good," he says again, but this time it isn't a compliment. "Nine months is a long time to keep a cover going." He strides forward and she pulls his door quickly closed, presses her back against the cool steel. "What are you doing in my room?"

"Nothing," she says, and sure, _that_ sounds completely believable.

"Move, Natasha," he says, firmly but quietly, and the disappointment tempering the words is worse than any shouting. She doesn't move, so he moves her himself, a soft push to the side. He takes his badge from her pocket and swipes it through the reader beside the door.

She knows what he's thinking and she can't fault him for it. She took credit for the party, spent the entire evening trying to distract him. He's clever and observant, he can probably recognize by now what it looks like when she works a mark. Hell, she'd rather him think she turned on him than see the sad little display in his apartment.

It's the perfect opportunity to run, while he advances cautiously into his quarters, but there isn't much point. She'll have to face him eventually. Her room is three doors further down the hallway, obvious, a terrible place to hide.

She leans against the wall instead and waits for him to laugh, or say something in that overly-polite tone he uses when expressing gratitude he doesn't actually feel.

"Asshole, Barton," he mutters, then louder, "Nat? I'm sorry, I-"

He steps back into the corridor and draws up short when he finds her where he left her. She can't quite meet his eyes.

"You weren't supposed to see."

"I'll leave if you're not done," Clint offers. He gives her a grin. "Swear I'll still act surprised."

She could still salvage the situation, pretend the mess in his quarters was meant to be the second part of the birthday celebration. It seems like too much effort. She's tired of pretending for the night.

That vulnerable feeling is back, a fluttery nervous sensation in her chest. She's tired of that, too.

"I was going to clean it up. It's stupid."

She stares him down, shifting into defensive mode, daring him to lie and insist otherwise. Arguments are easy, safe. Better than whatever spurred her into the gross display of sentimentality in Clint's quarters.

"It isn't stupid, Tasha."

He ignores her glare and pulls her in for a hug; she keeps up the pretense of fighting for another moment, shoulders stiff and palms pressed flat against his chest in protest, but it doesn't last. She leans into him, and he sighs against her hair, and the sick feeling in her stomach disappears.

"The other guys just wanted an excuse to order kegs and spend S.H.I.E.L.D's budget. I like your party better."

"It's ruined by now-"

"Stop whining, it isn't ruined. So we have to nuke the pizza and put the beer in the fridge, big deal."

He pulls her into his quarters with an arm around her shoulders and shuts the door. The champagne bucket full of beers on the kitchen table is dripping water on the floor, but the pizza and cupcakes are intact, and the balloons haven't gone flat. It's not as much of a disaster as she imagined.

Clint snatches his gift from the coffee table and shakes it on the way to the kitchen, then opens the envelope taped to the wrapping paper. He lights up at the fluffy golden dog on the front of the card, flips it open and mutters "Happy barkday" to himself.

She watches closely, because she knows she got this part wrong; she couldn't think of anything to write on the inside, and instead just signed her name.

"Nice," he says with a grin, and sticks the card to the fridge with a magnet. He slides the gift in carefully beside the cupcakes and little pack of candles. "We're supposed to wait until after pizza, but-"

"It's _your_ birthday," she tells him. He gives her another big smile and shoves half a cupcake in his mouth.

"See, your party's better because you made my favorite. I didn't even know German chocolate _cupcakes_ were a thing. The other guys just ordered that huge boring birthday cake."

Maybe he's trying a little too hard to make her feel better, but it's working, and she doesn't call him out.

Clint cleans up the melted ice and champagne bucket while she puts the pizza on paper plates for the microwave. It doesn't really feel special - besides the cupcakes and the gift, it isn't any different from how they usually spend a Friday night - but there's something easy and comforting in the way they maneuver around each other, and how she knows to put three slices of pizza on Clint's plate without asking. She knows where they'll sit on the couch and she knows which movie he'll choose. The effortless familiarity is what she'll pick, if Clint asks what she'd like to do for her own birthday.

"Watch this," he says, and lays his phone on the table. He pulls one of the balloons tied to his kitchen chairs, unties the knot at the bottom while his phone puts a call through.

"This is Fury," comes from the speaker. Clint sucks a deep breath of helium from the balloon.

"Heeeeey Nick!"

He catches her eye and snorts a laugh. She can't help but smile back at how ridiculous he sounds.

"Agent Barton," Fury replies, perfectly composed as always, but there's a hint of amusement hidden in the words.

"Nat wants to tell you something," Clint says in a rush, and thrusts the balloon at her.

She hesitates, but only because something between them feels different. A good different, a brighter spark of energy, something more than the usual quiet comfort of Clint's company. It's struck her once or twice before, small moments too happy to be real, unsettling enough to make her push him away.

Clint waits with a big grin, an expression so genuinely enthusiastic she can't turn him down. She doesn't want to, not this time. She finds herself smiling back.

Fury grinds out a sigh, but obligingly waits for whatever nonsense she's going to come out with. She takes the balloon and sucks out the helium, and now she believes Clint. Her party _is_ way better.


End file.
